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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

> I’m not sure if anyone noticed but NYTimes’ quality has gone downhill for the past 2-3 years

This has been said every year for my entire life. I would keep the NY Times, but also:

* The Financial Times is on the NY Times level IMHO, but far more expensive

* The Wall Street Journal is published by the same people behind Fox News. It's Fox News for the elite - framed in ways appealing to them, and trading on an old established brand. Same results, IME.

* The Economist can be fantastic in terms of knowledge gained / minute. It's ideologically free-market - applying that tool to every situation. And it's not actually journalism, it's analysis: They generally don't dig up stories, interview people, etc. They summarize and analyze.

* The Washington Post is nearly on the NYT level, IMHO.

* Maybe The Guardian?

That's it. Nothing else worth paying for (in English).

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The editorial / opinion pages of both NYT and WaPo ruined them for me. Thinking people want to read provocative, thoughtful perspectives that may challenge them, but the people and the positions in those pages are by and large, utter trash. Notice I didn't say anything about politics of left or right - I think there's trash there of both sides. We're talking people who are not good writers, who add nothing to public discourse, and who I would say spread a lot of at best half-truths and ill-informed ideas. So, I can't see paying for either one even though at least some of the journalism outside those sections is at least ok. Frankly, I think they both ride their past reputations and the fact they have survived by being in major urban centers while their past competitors (IE: small town newspapers, etc) have died.

The WSJ has equally horrid opinion pages, as does my local paper. Editorial sections are basically trash in general, avoid them like the plague and your experience will be much better.

Editorial sections are “clickbait” even before that was a thing. They’ve always existed to fire people up and sell papers.

The WSJ deserves its own special place in hell. Once upon a time 20ish+ years ago, it was solid business and economic news. Then they decided to do a redesign to be more general news, and then Murdoch came along and turned them into the comics.

I don't give The Economist a pass either. I started reading it in high school decades ago. Over time, they've moved away from deep journalism towards more of a weekly recap. If I want to know what happened this week, frankly I can get that from Twitter or Apple News for free. What is lacking is the kind of forward, somewhat out there perspective. There are still little bits of this with The Economist, but its a shell of its former self. I'd also remark that they have an angle on the world that I find at time ethically questionable.

WaPo's opinion articles are by far the worst thing about their paper, and some of the writers are worse than others (Thiessen is a master of bad faith arguments and dishonesty), so I've been avoiding reading them. I wish they had a way to permanently hide them in the app.

I think that describes all opinion writers. I (almost) never read them. If you are reasonably well-informed about an issue, almost every opinion article is transparent nonsense and manipulation.

The only exceptions I've seen are Will Bunch, who writes for one of the local big city US news publications but seems to get wider distribution (maybe syndicated?), and The Bulwark, a conservative (in the actual non-Trump sense) publication that is actually intellectually honest. I think there's another that I wish I remembered atm.

> The editorial / opinion pages of both NYT and WaPo ruined them for me. Thinking people want to read provocative, thoughtful perspectives that may challenge them, but the people and the positions in those pages are by and large, utter trash.

It sounds like you're emo-quitting over published perspectives that might be too challenging for you.

Oh for Pete's sake go back to your mom's basement you troll. Have you looked through your comments on this thread and others? You aren't adding to the dialog here, you are just being a jerk. No, I don't find the opinions of these writers challenging rather I get tired of having to go find sources that show just how munch bunk gets published. My beef is that I expect better from what are supposed to be journalistic leaders.

> I get tired of having to go find sources that show just how munch bunk gets published.

What is this "bunk" you've seen?

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