Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

OAN is to the right of all the major cable news networks, and CNN is the centermost of the major cable news network; that's not “two sides” of anything.

AT&T was heavily invested in the Right causes before acquiring CNN(’s parent, not CNN alone), and is investing to pushing the media space, and thus the Overton Windoe, to the Right; trying to push CNN hard directly would have visible pushback from staff and audience, shifting the ground under CNN doesn't have that problem.

View on HN

Allsides (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings) rates cnn and oan on either extreme.

For sure. NPR, Newsweek, and The Christian-Science Monitor aren't centrist by the most charitable of interpretations either unless you stopped reading those publications in 2008.

Al-Jazeera (which I don't see on that list for some reason), AP, and the BBC are the only ones I'd place in that middle column. The rest have obvious agendas in my opinion (e.g. if your publication unironically uses the term "incel" to refer to any group, you're not centrist).

Wait, what's wrong with using incel to refer to a group?

They call themselves incels and congregate on message boards and subreddits devoted to that category.

No news org is just randomly finding celibate young men and labelling them incels...

Incel is a portmanteau for involuntarily celibate. That is, men/people who are (conceivably) biologically unable to find a sexual partner. The opposite of this would be a slut - a woman or people who are biologically unable to stop themselves from rejecting potential sexual partners. Slut and incel are two sides of the same token.

You can easily find women proud to call themselves sluts, both online and in reality. However, one would hope that a news organization would use more specific and less degrading terms to describe groups that they are (theoretically) neutral toward. I've certainly never seen an NPR headline use the word "slut".

However, if you look at this NPR article[0], you can be sure that it would seem silly if it read "Police Foiled An Ohio Slut's Plot To Kill Women In A Mass Shooting, Prosecutors Say". One would hope that they would use a word closer to what they were meaning to say like "4chan-viewer" or "prostitute" or "shut-in". You've gotta figure that you'd only ever use a word like "incel" if you were a biased news organization...but, of course, NPR is above that.

[0]https://www.npr.org/2021/07/22/1019089834/police-foiled-an-o...

Read your own article.

NPR is reporting that prosecutors describe him as an incel. Prosecutors say that he identifies himself as an incel and posts on incel websites.

From your own source:

> "According to the indictment reviewed by NPR, Genco maintained a profile on a popular incel website from at least July 2019 through mid-March 2020. He posted frequently on this site, it alleges."

Other outlets repeat that he self-identifies[1] as an incel and even committed a crime that pays tribute to an incel "hero" that that specific community worships for murdering people.

1. https://www.fox19.com/2021/07/21/man-scouted-ohio-college-ma...

Those other outlets didn't put "incel" in the headline though. It would have been one thing if NPR put it in quotes but they didn't - the way it's written, it sounds like they themselves are identifying the individual as an "incel" which is just as strange as if they were to identify a prostitute in a headline as a "slut". It sounds incredibly biased to use that sort of language and, at the very least, comes off as out-of-place slang.

I get what you're saying, but how is incel different from "hacker" (when Anonymous does something newsworthy) or "neo-Nazi" or "White supremacist" in situations where the subject of the article wants to be known as part of that community?

The guy in your article doesn't seem to be ashamed of the word, and its original meaning wasn't pejorative to them. It was a way to find support without shame.

Slut was always a negative word that has had to be reclaimed, and there still aren't online slut communities inspiring each other to murder innocent people.

(I'm not the one downvoting you btw)

Allsides is pretty crappy, in using big wide groupings and in how they assign them and in the lack of detail; Ad Fontes Media is much better in every way.

https://adfontesmedia.com/

Note that Allsides exists to present the news as a balance. That's what they're selling. Not that this automatically makes them wrong, but it predisposes their perspective as seeking equal and opposite dichotomies.

Just for comparison, the commonly-cited Ad Fontes chart puts CNN as "skews left" and OAN as "hyperpartisan right".

https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/?utm_source=HomePage_St...

I will note, however, that Allsides is based on the web content, not the TV content. The Ad Fontes chart puts CNN's web and TV presence in about the same place, but OAN's as just "skews right". (More to the right than CNN's left, but given the vagaries of the definitions it's reasonable to put them in the same place.

It's remarkable that they put the OAN web presence slightly to the left of Fox News. Though this puts them just straddling the line of "hyperpartisan": OAN web to the left of it, Fox to the right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com