Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

People read something on CNN or NYTimes and think it must actually be true. The assumption is that stories are thoroughly fact checked and are free from any significant bias.

Once you've seen firsthand just how biased and intentionally misleading they can be you will see how fundamentally flawed their model is.

You shouldn't trust what Soledad O'Brien says just because she happens to work at CNN. Even the best of these organizations don't do enough to maintain the standards that would be necessary for you to trust everyone who works for them.

Hopefully in the future journalists will live and die by their own reputations, and not get to hide behind the power of "trusted" brands. The system as it is causes great harm to individuals, companies, and the world at large.

Just look at what certain people were able to do by leveraging the power of trusted news sources in the lead up to the the Iraq war. A few corrupt individuals were able to abuse the public's trust to push an agenda based on lies.

On a much smaller scale this is what Soledad O'Brien is doing to Arrington. She had an angle for a story and she did what was necessary to cast him as the bad guy. It's an unfair abuse of power and trust -- power and trust that she clearly doesn't deserve.

I agree completely and as a result I generally don't trust any news source that pretends to be objective (whatever that means in an environment where personal bias meets advertising revenue and the end-product is at least partly entertainment).

A whole lot of people jumped all over Arrington when he was (and still is) covering tech startups that he is invested in. It never bothered me, he was up front with his disclosures and although he tried to remain objective and even took several companies he invested in to task, having a reasonably clear statement of bias was helpful.

I prefer to read and consume opinion pieces over hard news because hard news reads more like opinion pieces without the author's bias being disclosed or at least well known (neither Limbaugh nor Olberman include disclosures, but neither have to go out of their way to make their political bias known).

Outside of politics and race, there's a lot of tech writers who see Apple as the company that can do no wrong and Microsoft as the company that can do no good. Earlier this year I was looking for an objective, terse, comparison on Relational Databases vs NoSQL in the tech press (yes, I know, not the best source for such things). I found it more useful to read from the diehards. They both knew the strengths of their design and the inherent weaknesses in their perceived competition. Take out the spitting and grumbling and you generally get a good picture when sent through the known bias filter of the author.

Story is everything for the media. I used to trust BBC until their subsidiary did a documentary on migrant workers that featured myself. Not that it was something vicious like the thing CNN did to Arrington - but it was so clearly manipulated to fit what they decided to make the story - that it makes me laugh. Things like:

1. For maybe 6 hours they spent in our flat my daughter cried maybe a minute or two - but they put it as one of the first scenes to set the emotional tone of the story.

2. When I say "There used to be lots of job adverts in this newspaper - now there is so few of them, everything is in the Internet" they cut it to "There used to be lots of job adverts in this newspaper - now there is so few of them."

At the end of the day, much of the blame for racism and inequality in the US lies with those who work for or subscribe to advertiser-supported media. Both Arrington and Soledad O'brien are part of the problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com