Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

zepto

My impression is that neither side is more “truthful”, but there is a strong qualitative difference between them.

The left tends to use true facts but to exclude inconvenient contradictions, and build misleading narratives.

The right on the other hand does seem to just spread straight up falsehoods.

So if you fact check them both, the right will look a lot worse.

View on HN

All the fact checking sites absolutely do treat what they consider to be misleading narratives as outright lies when the right does it though. So at least to some extent, that strong qualitative difference is just due to claims being treated differently depending on which political cause they support.

Until you ask about police statistics...

Do you have an example? Generally it’s what is left out that makes the bias.

if you swap the "left" and "right" labels you comment will be just as true (or false, depending on whom you ask).

NYU has very strong reputation in hard sciences but their social studies are hopelessly left-leaning and probably as far from neutral as Taliban studies on women's rights.

> if you swap the "left" and "right" labels you comment will be just as true (or false, depending on whom you ask).

I don’t think this is true. It also misses the point I was making.

The NYT is hopelessly left leaning, but they don’t generally report straight up falsehoods. Rather they construct biased narratives out of true facts.

Contrast that with fox.

Let's say I grant you this generalization (it seems like it could be true to me). Then it's not really the NYT vs Fox, is it? Doesn't sheer quantity matter? What fraction of the media (say, the stuff you're likely to see on Google News) is "left" vs "right"?

In other words, the suggestion is that the right lies outright, whereas the left lies via omission and cherry-picking to concoct stories. OK -- doesn't it matter that the left has, I don't know, 85% of the market share (that's what the tech giants endlessly blast out)?

I think the debate here was merely on misinformation, so to be honest I'd say market share doesn't necessarily apply here.

You might rightfully say that weaving a biased narrative out of truths could also be labeled misinformation, but in my own personal opinion I'd rather try and unravel that narrative than try to unravel a narrative based on straight up lies.

Also, some of the narrative weaving can be done in good faith or unknowingly (e.g. baively being somones interpretation for which they knoe of no alternative) but lying is never in good faith or accidental.

> OK -- doesn't it matter that the left has, I don't know, 85% of the market share (that's what the tech giants endlessly blast out)?

This isn't true. Fox News has been rated the most watched network many times including in July. According to a previous post here on HN, a lot of highest trending stuff spread on FB is right-wing.

Also almost all US media is to the right of almost all European media (notable exceptions including Poland and Hungary.)

Well, I grant it's hard to quantify. It was recently reported that Fox had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, but that's TV.

On the internet, it's a very different story. If you block left-leaning news outlets on Apple News, your front page may contain nothing at all. Google News has a permanent section devoted to leftist "fact checkers". Their "beyond the headlines" section currently displays the NYT, BBC, Vox, Guardian, Atlantic, WSJ, Slate, Verge, and AP.

WSJ is owned by Murdoch and is pretty far right-wing even for the US, but like I said, all of that is considered right-wing or "centrist" to be very charitable (although obviously not conservative except the WSJ) in Europe and to anyone who actually calls themselves a leftists (or a political sciensit.)

How is wsj far-right? You are totally making things up.

https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart

Your own graph shoes that they are right wing. I said pretty far to the right which obviously they are, not "far-right."

The whole idea of investigating "spread of misinformation" in the current politicized climate is unscientific at best and agenda-driven at worse. You've got to take a political stand to declare something "misinformation".

I don't think so. If you openly and intentially select creditable data-driven academic researchers from both sides of political spectrum (or having an established record of being politically neutral), you can run a research study close to politically neutral.

The NY Times isn't "far left." Let's compare "Mother Jones" to "Fox"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com