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I agree with holding all media accountable. But the problem with what you say is that for millions and millions 'news' is actually BS opinion shows. On both sides but from my perspective Fox & Murdoch's empire abroad has done far more harm than say Maddow preaching whatever riles that audience up.

The actual press, WaPo, NyTimes (which does great docs, so does Vice imho) have rigid editorial process. Yet I still on HN people say NyTimes is liberal which I don't belive either.

Facebook further blurs the difference between objective analysis, expert opinion, and uninformed nonsense. And, yes, like the talk shows, it profits off this amplification of nonsense. Algorithmic engagement is the natural evolution of "if it bleeds, it leads".

Facebook just happens to be much bigger and much better at it than the legacy news companies.

I've found this site to be pretty fair when rating media bias. It lists all the three sites as having liberal bias.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

Also I want to point out Vice gave a known murderer a national interview for him to push his fake narrative. Meanwhile there was an actual video and pictures of the killing that completely blew away any notion this was anything other that a murder. Michael Reinoehl hide behind a wall, came out behind two people, and shot one in cold blood. The two people were simply walking. The video and pictures of the killing were available online before Vice decided to give him an interview.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7g8vb/man-linked-to-killing...

"Now, I know there are some polls out there saying [George W. Bush] has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, [...] because 32 percent means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash."

(And what is the Vice article an example of? Presenting both sides of an issue?)

Vice are an absolute shower of bastards, I don’t read anything there after they basically outed SexyCyborg even though she begged them not to, and then took her patreon down cutting off a lot of her funding… [0]

Wankers.

0: https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/20/spat-chinese-hacker-vic...

their founder definitely is ;)

Definitely not on the level as NyTimes but I was just mentioning their weekly news and video I find really good. They have stories no one else covers.

New York Times is listed as center-left and high factual though. Orbiting the center and factual is really about as good as you’re going to get for less biased reporting. (Ignoring how even that is reductive, and that the NYT definitely has its own set of biases that don’t neatly fit on the left-right spectrum.)

The issue with the NYT is not around factual reporting but that they are shifting away from fact based reporting to opinions that are being presented as facts.

I read an article about a voting bill that had passed in some Republican state. The whole article was about how this is voter suppression, how Republicans don't like minorities, what politicians on Twitter had to say. In the whole article there was only ONE brief sentence that mentioned what was IN the bill.

Yes I agree this is misleading especially online the small 'opinion' sub heading is really small like on Apple News. All the majors are guilty of this.

> The actual press, WaPo, NyTimes (which does great docs, so does Vice imho) have rigid editorial process.

That hasn't stopped them from publishing complete bullshit to start wars and similarly abominable shit. The New York Times allowed Judith Miller to uncritically publish flagrant government lies to start the Second Iraq War. In the leadup to the First Iraq War, ABC and NBC published atrocity propaganda (the "Nayirah testimony") for the American government. In the 20th century, the New York Times let Walter Duranty publish Stalinist propaganda denying genocidal oppression and famine in Ukraine. In the late 19th century, a bunch of American newspapers were used to start a bullshit war with Spain.

> The actual press, WaPo, NyTimes (which does great docs, so does Vice imho) have rigid editorial process. Yet I still on HN people say NyTimes is liberal which I don't belive either.

The New York times and WaPo? You mean the ones that consistently do things like make up false allegations about children (Nick Sandmann... the kid who smiled) and take much more time to scrutinize the later proof of their wrong doing than they ever did for their initial reporting? This happens constantly. It's not a one time event. It's almost like they're pushing an agenda.

The 'right wing' bias of the NYT tends to be around being Warhawks, but the right wing isn't necessarily the sole wing of war hawks in this country. The last republican president was quite anti-war.

If you don't believe NYT is liberal, you're just refusing to recognize the reality. You may love NYT, you may agree with what they say 100 times out of 100, which is fine, but it doesn't change the fact they are a liberal media outlet and have been since forever. If you ignore that, you're just voluntarily skewing your picture of reality. Maybe you think "liberal" means "bad" (which would be weird as I suspect your opinions are pretty liberal too) - or maybe you think it means "good" - but in fact it just means they follow certain ideology, and it's a very easily observable fact. Whether it's good, or bad, it's for the reader to decide, but whatever you position on this it it does not change the fact that the ideology exists and is followed.

Do you have examples of importantly not opinion pieces which you consider liberal? to me their reporting is very flat and caged in a good way.

First of all, I don't see why opinion pieces should be excluded. If a newspaper only publishes liberal opinions, it's a liberal newspaper. And we all know one can be fired from NYT for allowing a non-liberal opinion to be published.

Second, just looking at today's politics page, we can see criticizing McConnell, promoting Biden's "infrastructure" spending, criticizing Kirsten Sinema, lamenting Democratic loss of votes, attacking Arizona for removing mask mandates, pushing the angle that parents objecting to teaching CRT are "domestic terrorists", reporting Democrat talking points on budget issue while not even bothering with representing the other side. This would be very weird for a balanced media, but completely as expected for a liberal one. To be sure, I'd of course except the same behavior (with a different accent, of course) from a conservative newspaper - criticizing Biden and not McConnell, opposing Biden bills and not supporting them, etc. etc. The point is there's clear ideological position which can be identified very easily. If you take a random article from NYT and show it to somebody without telling where it's from and ask if it's from a liberal or conservative newspaper, I'm sure you get very high percentage of correct answers. It's rather obvious - and if you look it up, NYT people aren't exactly hiding it.

And that happens every day, day to day. Of course, compared to some antifa twitter, they're probably "caged" and "flat". They are a respectable, mainstream, run-of-the-mill liberal newspaper.

But you know what, don't believe me. I'm just some random dude on the internet, what do I know. Just ask their public editor: https://archive.ph/A26ZF

You don't have to read long. Just read the first line.

It's opinion, from 2004, and mostly references 'big city' centric coverage. Call out to anti-gay marriage lol ;)

Which I guess I understand. If I tried to view from the perspective that I lived in Missouri, reading fashion reports like that piece illustrates would seem foreign to my world view and maybe scary like it's pushing some comical 'fly over state' vs the elites worldview.

But I don't know if I would concede that's liberal it's not my issue, like I know it's outdated but you can draw a line from gay rights as mentioned to trans rights today. I hate that some view this as 'political' to score points endangering people, versus I see it as basic human rights.

But thank you I do see more this viewpoint that culture has become very political today and that does help explain the strong reaction from the right.

1. The mainstream news pushed numerous stories over the past years without those rudimentary truthiness checks.

2. I disagree with many points in that paragraph: - echo chambers: when was the last time you heard a nuanced "from the other aisle" opinion from a NYT reader; an opinion that wasn't covered in the NYT. Same echo chamber, just a different format. - news companies are small and irrelevant: Seems like this narrative has captured everybody's imagination today. Everybody is talking about it. It might even lead to action in Congress. Are news companies really that small and irrelevant as you claim them to be?

I read the times almost everyday and have plenty of conservative opinions. The Times has multiple conservative columnists and consistently publishes conservative op-eds.

You're in the minority.

These 'conservative' columnists do not reflect the majority of conservative opinion in this country though. NYT columnists tend to be members of the political or cultural elite. There is a large strain of anti-elite sentiment running through the country right now, especially on the right. These people do not feel their views are expressed in the NYT. For that matter, I know plenty of working-class dems who feel disenfranchised with the NYT, the media elite, the democratic party, etc.

Conservatives at NYT do not reflect the opinions of most conservatives or most conservative media.

If you want a taste of conservative media, look at what is collated on RealClearPolitics. NYT is very different, you won't see Ross Douthat saying the same things they say in The Federalist.

A liberal is a capitalist is a conservative. The NY Times hails from smack-dab in the middle of the corporate center of American politics.

I’d heavily recommend Matt Taibbi’s Hate Inc to learn more about how news media lies, how it addicts people to its consumer product, and ultimately how high bar publications have been long dead. From the book;

“The public largely misunderstands the “fake news” issue. Newspapers rarely fib outright. Most “lies” are errors of omission or emphasis. There are no Fox stories saying blue states have lower divorce rates, nor are there MSNBC stories exploring the fact that many pro-choice Democrats, particularly religious ones, struggle with a schism between their moral and political beliefs on abortion.”

> One, most of the mainstream news has at least basic editorial processes in place that do a rudimentary check on truthiness.

Come on, man. There are just so many counter examples, from the "paper of record" NYT (1619 Project) to MSNBC (Russia nonsense) to Fox News (literally everything) to Rolling Stone (A Rape on Campus) I could sit here all day listing outright lies and untruths published in the pages of mainstream media outlets in order to push an agenda.

I agree, and that's why I said "rudimentary". Still, as content producers and not algorithmic aggregators, both their ability and success at amplifying disinformation is much, much less than Facebook's. Even Breitbart or DailyKOS's impacts -- as outlets who often and purposefully distort the truth -- are not even rounding errors to Facebook's sheer scale.

Both are true. Both the news and social media optimize for clickbait, which bad actors use to slip in misinformation. What's funny is, people use the exact language about the news. They'll say that CNN is just being used by the far left to promote far-left views, or that Fox News is being used by the far-right to promote far-right views. Yet when the medium is Facebook instead of the media, suddenly it's a problem that must be solved with more laws.

Facebook and other internet media have special Section 230 exemptions from libel and other things that print media and media using public airwaves do not.

How about we just remove that so they are all equal? Not special or "more laws," just equal.

Agreed. I'll just add, specifically the media's agenda is making money, and just like FB it affects their ethical obligation to society.

The surge in click-bait and outrageous lies is eroding one of the pillars of freedom: the freedom of the press. Now, the press is largely viewed as untrustworthy by 60% of the US population.

Source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrus...

1619 Project? "The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative"?

I mean, sure, some historians objected (https://web.archive.org/web/20200814135117/https://www.nyboo... [1], https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians...). But if "cynicism" is a sin, everyone here on HN (and not the least you) are due for some unpleasant cigars in hell.

[1] I note that I, non-historian that I am, could poke some logical and (from primary sources) historical holes in that speech.

Facebook has more rudimentary checks on truthiness than any of mainstream news organizations.

Explain?

>"basic editorial processes in place that do a rudimentary check on truthiness"

I think this is merely an illusion. The beauty of English is that you can spin a story a dozen different ways while still presenting 'true' facts/details about an event. (Edit: "Fiery, but mostly peaceful" is a quintessential example of this.) You can also shape how strongly the public reacts to something by how much you decide to cover the story. I guarantee you that if the Fall of Kabul happened under Donald Trump's administration we'd still be getting daily news stories about the fallout.

Furthermore, the press has done an excellent job of branding itself as an impartial arbiter of truth, whereas in reality they're just another business run by people with their own motivations.

> at least basic editorial processes in place that do a rudimentary check on truthiness

I mean, you really need to watch a whole Tucker Carlson episode.

The vast majority of what you could call disinformation is directly downstream of mainstream media sources. FB is a platform: the content has to come from somewhere, and it’s usually downstream of these news companies. Should FB be banning Fox and MSNBC? What’s the expectation here?

While "mainstream media" deserves its share of opprobrium, they didn't generate a lot of the "content" shared on Facebook:

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2019-02/14/1...

Or if they did, they'd be looking at some consequences.

Yeah, but by VPVs those groups don't. I think Fox News and Ben Shapiro were the two highest VPV producers of what was dubbed misleading content.

Have you ever watched fox? People die every day because of their anti vaccine crap. Basic editorial process.

I was just listening to hannity the other day and the man was constantly talking about how you should talk to your doctor about vaccines because it's the best way to prevent covid. Listening to Cavuto the other afternoon, and heard a similar sentiment on his show. Who are you listening to exactly? The majority of anchors, especially the biggest ones, seem to basically endorse the vaccine.

> rudimentary check on truthiness

Did you miss the part where they lie pretty much all the time nowadays to advance political agendas? The argument being made by this "whistleblower" is merely that FB should be required to do the same. The only "whistle" she's really "blowing" here is that of the DNC. I'm sure Zuck is smart enough to see how detrimental this is to his company's long term success, or even existence. Founders and executives: background check your future employees and screen them for activist backgrounds. If they have any of that - do not hire. They themselves say political affiliation is not a protected category. They are dangerous for business. Let them taste their own medicine.