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Comment by lovegoblin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, Teen Vogue has plenty of solid journalism.

I'm genuinely not sure if this is sarcasm or not. Teen Vogue is certainly surprisingly serious, but my standard for "solid journalism" involves some attempt at neutrality and objectivity as opposed to hyper-partisan ideology marketed to children. To be quite clear, the overall modern media landscape is highly partisan and sensationalist; Teen Vogue mostly only stands out in that they're marketing their divisive ideology directly to children.

EDIT: This is unsurprisingly attracting downvotes. I'm curious if people are objecting to the characterization of Teen Vogue as partisan and ideological or the implication that marketing divisive ideology to children is a social ill? Or perhaps that journalism should aspire toward the truth and not partisan advocacy?

I assure you it is not sarcastic at all.

Thanks for clarifying.

Sure, I’ll bite. I downvoted you because it’s not partisanship or divisiveness that should be decried, but the immense wealth inequality in the United States. And perhaps Teen Vogue is progressive because that’s where their readership already is, as opposed to them simply preying on a vulnerable population.

Thanks for responding. For what it's worth, I fully agree that wealth inequality is one of the most important issues in America. On many policy issues, I'm progressive. But I just can't get behind political propaganda ('advocacy', if that's easier to swallow) billing itself as 'journalism', which I believe should ultimately be about seeking the truth (and ergo a pursuit of neutrality and objectivity). Journalism is most valuable when it hosts a robust debate; when one party to the debate is consistently a stooge or a caricature, the "debate" is less than worthless. The ideals of neutrality and objectivity are particularly important when children are the audience--the objective should be teaching children to think for themselves, not teaching them what they ought to think. Once upon a time I understood these to be progressive values.

> ’journalism', which I believe should ultimately be about seeking the truth (and ergo a pursuit of neutrality and objectivity)

This doesn’t exist. I haven’t yet given up hope that it could someday exist, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t currently. Would love to be proven wrong though.

A perfectly neutral and objective journalism hasn't existed, but the aspiration toward neutrality and objectivity have existed and even been mainstream at points in our history. In my lifetime, it's a relatively recent phenomena that media outlets were openly biased, viewing their function as "activism" rather than truth-seeking.

Maybe I'm just being cynical but I disagree. It may have appeared so outwardly, but I'm skeptical that the core motivation for mainstream journalism has ever been objectivity. I mean Manufacturing Consent is from 1988 and covers much of the 20th century, and it's not like things have improved since.

Do you think the media landscape of the 90s and 00s was just as partisan and sensationalist as today? Can you imagine the media reporting outright, easily verifiable falsehoods on their front page? Where were the 90s reporters standing in front of a burning building talking about “mostly peaceful protests”? Or the Damore memo being called “an anti-diversity screed” or the whole Covington Catholic affair? That was once the realm of parody. Before 2014, I think BLM coverage would have been “The left is angry about disproportionately black police shootings, but the moderates point out that blacks commit more violent crime and also here are some heinous anecdotes of police killings of white people. Everyone agrees that there are too many police killings. Stay tuned for a story about a dancing bear after the break.”.

The media helped the Bush administration manufacture consent for the second gulf war. The infamous lies peddled on every major news channel and newspaper are recorded for all time.

Parenti wrote Inventing Reality and Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent in the 80's. Your examples of lies that that you believe demonstrate how especially bad media is today just reveal that you only notice certain exaggerations or interpretations of news that go against your politics.

I presume you think yourself unbiased too.

My politics are left wing. I could no doubt pick some fox news examples if I watched/read that outlet. The media may have helped Bush’s war, but they weren’t uniformly conservative and they also didn’t tell overt, easily verifiable lies. It’s one thing to report that the intelligence community says there are WMDs, and quite another thing to outright lie about the contents of a memo or a video which are publicly available.

> I presume you think yourself unbiased too.

0/2 on your assumptions about me. Of course I’m biased; everyone is biased. The difference is that I don’t double down on my biases, but rather challenge and evolve them by reading and debating other points of view. Note that the stark contrast between that and the folks (esp in the media) who persecute others for ideological transgressions.

You're not left wing. You're a liberal.

Liberals are left of center in American politics, but whatever. I like liberalism and I favor policies that are frequently associated with progressives.

Fox News was notoriously famous for having extremely negative coverage on African Americans during the 1990s through 2014. They still are famous for that. National Review was extremely famous for it, too. The New York Times was also a conservative outlet, as I mention elsewhere, having hawked for every war since Vietnam.

Even the person Damore was inspired to write his manifesto because of (SlateStarCodex) admitted it was too far.

Biased reporting isn't new, it's always been universal, and it'll never go away. You just sound like you want more conservative outlets. Here's a tip: Turn on your local news. Local news in America is almost always owned by one of three conservative companies (Sinclair and Nextstar come to mind most immediately), and all of them have an extremely conservative bent.

That's not even getting into the bias of media on scientific issues. HIV/AIDS never got proper coverage, and the coverage it did get was usually outright wrong and hostile during the 1990s. Climate change? Completely debatable! A matter of emotion! They were still pushing that up until a few years ago. Encryption? Can be government-crackable and still secure! That's been a constant topic since the 1990s, too!

https://www.vox.com/2015/3/26/8296091/media-bias-race-crime

According to a report by the progressive research center Media Matters, New York City television stations give disproportionate coverage to crimes involving black suspects.

The Media Matters study found that between August 18 and December 13, 2014, the stations (WCBS, WNBC, WABC, and WNYW) used their late-night broadcasts to report on murder, theft, and assault cases in which African Americans were suspects at rates that far exceeded African-American arrest rates for those crimes.

There's always bias. Always will be bias. The above issue was even worse in the past.

Yes, Fox is part of the problem and there will always be bias, but again, there’s a difference between being biased but aspiring for the truth and committing oneself to one’s biases (partisanship). The media landscape of yore was mostly the former even though Fox and other outlets were exceptions to the rule. Today’s media landscape is almost entirely partisan with few outlets that seem to aspire toward neutrality and objectivity.

You seem to be conflating neutrality and objectivity with bipartisanship. It's pretty obvious that there is only one party in the USA that even pretends to value neutrality and objectivity, and it's not the party that elected Donald Trump.

No one is talking about bipartisanship. I chose my words deliberately; there is no subtext. :)

That seems revisionist. Your earlier comment specifically mentions “hyper-partisanship.”

It’s not revisionist, but I see now where the misunderstanding is. Partisanship means “commitment to an ideology”.

Interesting, that is one definition of partisanship:

> the quality or state of being partisan : strong and sometimes blind adherence to a particular party, faction, cause, or person [0]

Didn't know that, thanks.

[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/partisanship

Journalism was rarely feigning objectiveness: during the 1920s through the 1970s, some of the strongest voices in favor of labor were journalists. "Neutrality" is largely a construct, or meme, that has been pushed by Rupert Murdoch since he founded his "news" network. Naturally, his own properties are nowhere near objective, despite some people claiming WSJ magically escapes bias.

Everything is naturally biased, the only distinction is whether an entity is open about their bias. This goes for anything: whether it was the New York Times and FOX hawking for nearly every war during the 2000s, or it was Newsweek favoring MLK Jr. and Life describing his speeches with phrases like "demagogic slander" during the 1960s, everyone's naturally got an opinion. This doesn't stop applying when writing about a subject.

> Journalism was rarely feigning objectiveness

Granted. The extent to which journalism is valuable is the extent to which it is neutral and objective. When it abandons even the pursuit of truth, it becomes a social ill.

> Everything is naturally biased, the only distinction is whether an entity is open about their bias.

I don't think this is true on any level of analysis (though it is one of the most popular and obvious of mistruths). At the individual level, one can choose to counterbalance his biases or commit himself to them. He can choose to lean on rhetoric or reason. He can debate against his most competent opponents or he can choose stooges. He can choose between straw men and steel men. He can choose to be honest (if fallible) or dishonest.

At an organizational level, we can choose between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. We can have an ideological monoculture or a diverse culture. We can build a culture that calls out rhetoric and favors reason. The net result of a heterodox organization isn't the absolute lack of bias, but the bias is severely attenuated compared to the modern newsroom.

funny.

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