Comment by hnhg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnhg | Hacker News Reader

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It's been fun playing around with it, thanks for putting this together, it's nice work.

I have a couple of observations: firstly, it's interesting that the Guardian is considered to be dead-centre, while most in the UK would say that it's quite on the left. I found that surprising.

Also, I guess this analysis is taken from the perspective of the USA, given the chart on adfontesmedia. The definition of left and right (at least the Overton window) differs somewhat by country, and I feel that should be made clear on your site for global visitors.

On the topic of differences, I spotted Al Jazeera on there and it made me recall that 'Al Jazeera Arabic vs Al Jazeera English' has now become somewhat of a meme, with the former being anything but progressive: https://twitter.com/search?q=al%20jazeera%20arabic%20vs%20al...

That again just makes me think of how news outlets change their reporting depending on the audience. I'm not sure if that changes anything for you though.

> I have a couple of observations: firstly, it's interesting that the Guardian is considered to be dead-centre, while most in the UK would say that it's quite on the left. I found that surprising.

Who? Both Ad Fontes and AllSides say that The Guardian merely skews to the left, and Ad Fontes' analysis concludes that it's one of the "most reliable". (Ad Fontes' analysis here: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-bias-and-reliabil...)

I haven't seen anyone say that it's "quite on the left" in any sphere other than the partisan right.

Edit: Even OP's project seems to represent the modest left-skew accurately. Can you help me understand where your "dead-centre"-on-OP's-platform v. "quite on the left" interpretations came from?

https://i.imgur.com/NTmQERS.png

Tory UK tends to characterize the Guardian as raving lefty lunatics, just as the right characterizes the NYT in the US.

Not lunatics but very raving leftist for the last four years.

People aren’t great at distinguishing comment and editorial from the news.

It’s probably true that the Guardian’s news is centre-left, as you say. However their comment and editorial is usually pretty far left (Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, etc), and that’s what gets noticed and gives them this reputation.

https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/

I'd say that it's essentially all editorial at this point.

It strikes me as several waves peaking at the same time. One being normal civilization cycles that result in political violence, another being a death of professional standards in reporting. To be fair, some eras of broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers were just as manipulative as the modern ones.

A practice I try to stick to is to read non-Anglosphere (and particularly non-US) newspapers only. For one thing, the rest of the world appears to keep on keepin' on and isn't overly concerned with the minutiae of US palace politics or the Chauvin trial.

I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK; I don't think there's anything to the left of them outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications. Internal disputes within the left play out within their comment section, whilst the news section often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal.

> I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK; I don't think there's anything to the left of them outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications. Internal disputes within the left play out within their comment section, whilst the news section often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal.

This only reinforces the meta-point. Everyone's sharing their perception without citing anything. So far, the few research entities looking into media bias are all asserting (with randomly sampled data points as best as I can tell) that The Guardian presents reliable news with a left-leaning opinion skew, whereas self-selected commenters (i.e. those who chose to reply to my initial comment) here are asserting from their own perception that The Guardian's "basically the left-wing paper," "editorial is usually pretty far left," and "quite on the left."

There's value in learning the methodologies employed by these analysis firms and think tanks, deciding whether you agree with how their analysis is performed, and upon deciding, either performing the same (time consuming) analysis yourself or delegating to the group(s) who's methods you most align with. That's largely why I'm fine with Ad Fontes. I haven't looked into how AllSides draws their conclusions, but either way, they're both in agreement re: The Guardian.

This is a healthier way to conclude how a news outlet leans compared to just going by our own perception.

Agreed on biased perceptions of the guardian.

Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception out there that the Guardian's comment section in particular is pretty left wing particularly on identity politics stuff. Even if the core paper is pretty central - e.g. It broadly supported the Blairites over the Corbynites over past few years.

It would be really interesting to have some visual data on their comments section here compared to other papers e.g. of numbers of articles on say class, race, gender and some kind of ranking of their left wing / right wing strength. And likewise for regular reported core news/articles.

As it stands there might be a lot of bias in people's individual views- including this comment.

Still it is interesting to compare articles. It's a cool site.

Your comment about the Guardian prompted me to check and it turns out there is a comprehensive page on Wikipedia. Who knew? The Guardian isn't on it but the Daily Mirror is - not sure I understand why since I would pretty much agree with you. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_left-wing_publicatio...

I'm not sure what the methodologies are. There is no objective "left" or "right", the two camps are just defined in relation to a supposed center. Where you place a newspaper depends on your perception of what the center should be- and that's a political, not a factual choice- which depends on the moment, the culture, etc.

I've checked the bias analysis of some Guardian articles in one of your sources. They strike me all as pretty far left- if not in the contents, in the choice of subjects. Consider that it's perfectly possibile to compose a newspaper entirely of dry, factual articles about, for example, episodes of worker's abuse or of immigrant criminality. Each article is absolutely unbiased, the newspaper is absolutely biased.

> I'm not sure what the methodologies are.

https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...

https://www.adfontesmedia.com/white-paper-multi-analyst-rati...

> They strike me all as—

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ don't know what to tell you. It took me all of "ad fontes methodology" in google to find the links above, and their approach is objectively stronger than your or my gut feeling/opinion.

And if you were to ask for my opinion, I'd say that The Guardian leans ever so slightly right, but that's why I rely on objective methods to rank media bias rather than my own gut.

Sorry, you're right, I should have googled. Those methodologies don't strike me as particularly insightful- in the end what they try to do is to give some structure to the guts feelings of the (however chosen) reviewers.

Anyway, to go back to the original point, Ad Fontes puts the Guardian solidly in the left (22% to the left). Looking at a sample of rated articles, only 2 out of 25 are classified as imperceptibly to the right, while a few get close to the "hyper-partisan left" field.

Looking at specific ratings, an article titled "Scandal! Horror! Biden's press-briefing notes prompt rightwing outrage" (featuring a mocking tone and a clear indication of the "enemy" right in the headline) is given a -9 bias, the same rating of the newspaper as a whole. And "skews to the left" feels like an understatement.

(Ah, looking at the media bias chart, turns out that the New York Post (whose articles are sometimes censored by Facebook) would be less biased that the Guardian. Interesting.)

I see that CNN is in the middle-of-the-road section.

Search 'Trump' (naturally, it's currently the best test case) and you get:

"Former President Donald Trump repeated familiar lies about the 2020 election and insulted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Saturday when speaking to Republican National Committee donors gathered for the first time since Trump’s defeat, a person in the room told CNN."

'familiar lies' 'insulted' 'a person in the room told'

The Weekly World News has taken over the world.

... What would the proper ultra-centrist way of characterising lying and insulting Mitch McConnell be? Like, are you expecting them to use euphemisms, or just not reporting on former presidents lying?

I was thinking about that. It's not so much being a 'centrist' but being able to tell the difference between reporting and interpreting. The best case would simply be a transcript.

I would start by saying that Donald Trump made claims about the election and finish up by stating the actual things that he said about Mitch McConnell. Being an adult, I'm quite able to figure out the context and severity of what he said. In addition, I'd probably use better sourcing than 'some unnamed guy we talked to'.

Like I said upstream somewhere, it would be fun to rewrite news articles to report news rather than to interpret news. Save the prose for editorials.

This.

We haven't had real news reporting in the US in a long time. The family and I watch BBC America for something more akin to news here, as the major "news" orgs in the US, are spittle inflected hyper-partisans. All of them.

This deeply saddens me, but I suppose it was inevitable.

> In addition, I'd probably use better sourcing than 'some unnamed guy we talked to'.

So, I see a lot of complaints about this, but everyone uses unattributed sources. It is realistically the only way to report on politics, unless you just want to print press releases, which is really more the realm of wire services. This is how it has always worked. (Even then you have to be careful; politicians often make press releases by leak...)

I don’t see an issue with pointing out that a lie is a lie.

CNN and its ilk haven't been news for a very long time. Moreover, classifying them as "middle of the road" is insulting to those of use who are centrist, middle of the roaders.

I’m impressed. This really shows the utility of lying often, loudly, publicly and repeatedly in shaping public opinion and perception. I stopped reading any British newspaper but the Guardian in the early 2000s but the idea that it’s any less partisan than the Fabian Society...

I wanted to keep the website "clean" (whatever that means) that's why I did not specifically states that their.news is mainly built for US news. But I agree that this could have been made more clearer.

Regarding the al jazeera thing: I was thinking about adding news with foreign languages and then using e.g. deepl.com to translate all the news on the fly and make it searchable. This would be really cool, but would require a pretty big restructuring of the project.

In US at least, the population skews substantially left. Younger folks in the US lean quite left but don't vote.

While Republicans and Democrats are represented fairly evenly in elections, in population surveys that include non-voters Democrats have a ~20% edge.

For example, if only people under 45 voted in the last election, Biden would have won over 400 electoral votes. Perhaps getting the most in history.

So the definition of left leaning varies depending on whether you include all voters or the whole population.

This accounts for some of the reason why conservatives dismay media, tech, science, media, and schools being "run by the left". They are. The working and school population is younger and also votes less, and is very liberal compared to party policy positions.

The parties pander to the average voter, and news orgs to the average American. That's why so many news orgs "lean left"

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