Hacker News Reader

Average doesn’t mean everyone all the time.

Given enough samples you can find every form of bias in every single news organization.

Yes, that means there are some pro right stores on NPR and pro left stories on Fox News. What’s really fascinating is when you find oddballs supporting fascism etc. It’s not intentional but simply passing along stories from other groups is so much easier than doing an in depth investigation on each and every little thing.

> Average doesn’t mean everyone all the time.

But you don't have to be biased every time to be biased. Trust is based on consistency.

> - Refusing to admit when they've misled people in the past, disinterest in publishing post mortems of their failures. Example: the lack of contrition over the Russiagate conspiracy theory.

On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore. I can't tell fact from fiction as the noise level has completely erased any signal at all (if there even was a signal).

Russia is known however to want to influence US politics, so my personal assumption is that they're amplifying BOTH sides to drive division, as stated by Russian author Dugin in his book "Foundations of Geopolitics". This nice quote from wikipedia containing quotes from the book is illustrative:

> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

> On this point the media on both sides has so muddied the waters I now assume nothing about this as I can't tell which side is telling the truth anymore.

The Columbia Journalism Review is about as reliable on media matters as you could want, and Jeff Gerth is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist with decades of investigative journalism experience at the NY Times.

He lays out an extensive case showing that there was an effort to mislead the public.

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-p...

> The Columbia Journalism Review is about as reliable on media matters as you could want, and Jeff Gerth is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist

These bonafides aside this particular piece has faced a mountain of criticisms [1] and from a quick read doesn't pass the smell test for journalistic integrity itself. It makes Trump sound like a victim, a saint and a martyr all at once.

> Trump, unaware of the coming tornado, including the most salacious contents of the dossier, set out to form a government and make peace with the press. He made the rounds of news organizations, meeting with broadcast anchors, editors at Condé Nast magazines, and the Times.

> Trump’s longest sit-down after the election was with the Times, including the then-publisher, editors, and reporters. For seventy-five minutes Trump’s love/hate relationship with his hometown paper was on display.

> At the end, he called the Times a “world jewel.”

> He added, “I hope we can get along.”

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerth#Career (last paragraph)

> These bonafides aside this particular piece has faced a mountain of criticisms

Congratulations on relying on Trump's own strategy of declaring any critical reporting, no matter how well sourced, to be "Fake News".

> It makes Trump sound like a victim, a saint and a martyr all at once.

This is laughably false to any fair minded person who has even skimmed the article.

For example in paragraph six:

>At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth. (The Washington Post has tracked thousands of Trump’s false or misleading statements.)

Throwing away the public's trust in the media because you're unwilling to stick to factual reporting on Trump's screw ups is the very definition of "You're not helping."

That was a great read, thanks.

“There was message distortion,” former director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. told The Fact Checker in a telephone interview. “All we were doing was raising a yellow flag that this could be Russian disinformation. Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.” He said he was unaware of how Biden described the letter during the debate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/13/hunter-bi...

Yes there's any number of sources one can dig up to support either argument that come from well trusted sources.

Russia's known to want to disrupt elections anywhere they can however. They'll even spread in the media the _appearance_ that elections were distorted to muddy the waters further even if no election interference took place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

I don’t doubt that many foreign entities have interests at stake and ongoing efforts to influence US elections and vice versa. These efforts will take many forms with some appearing less legitimate than others.

If you see the world as indecipherably muddy other than Russia has some otherworldly electoral propaganda power, well then it isn’t clear why you comment.

I think your response represent a common trap that people fall into, where we treat "the media" as if it's one entity, whereas in fact it's many distinct entities with very different attributes.

When we blame "the media" by lumping them all together, it's like blaming "the Americans," when in fact there is a big diversity in what Americans do and think.

You may be right - in theory. But existence of Journalist collaboration networks make this a moot point. Google JournOList and tell me there isn’t any coordination.

Edit - one other point, so many articles are also sourced from Reuters and AP that the Media, while different companies all have the same source material.

Yes there are exceptions, but they tend to prove the rule. A lot of the problems with "the media" are really problems with standard journalistic practices and those are uniform.

The OP's point is a subtler one, which seeks to explore _why_ journalists do what they do in the first place. Sure, it's charitable: they are undoubtedly some who seek to go "straight to the top" by aping whatever bias their editors favor etc. But there's far more news out there to report than just the clickbaity subjects you seem to favor -- Russiagate, Bill Gates, COVID, climate change -- and the folks doing it deserve credit.

The place to look is local journalism. Countless stories are broken by local journalism and then picked up by the majors, but those local journalists are facing a depressing reality that the OP cites, alongside the general assault on small media outlets. I really wish that US administrations would focus their antitrust guns on media centralization and not just big tech, as it's actively harming us to be losing local investigative reporting at this level.

Indeed, it's a weak argument to focus on global-scale topics as a way to attack individual journalists when those are precisely the ones that will have the scale to invite the most editorial manipulation. Why not mention the most glaring examples of individual journalists actively corrupting the truth, like Judith Miller actively pushing propaganda about Iraq WMDs for years with the full support of the New York Times.

Those are pretty much all problems at the level of the editors, not the individual journalists.

> the way the press constantly cites academic "experts" whose papers are known to not replicate or which have major methodology problems.

Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not if they are not specialized science reporters.

We shouldn't be blaming the pencils those journalists used either I suppose, the graphite didn't have an intent to deceive. But those pencils, like those journalists, operated in an environment that makes deception a goal, and the only product at the end of the line was a misleading one.

It's individual journalists that take the grants, they take the interviews with discredited people, they refuse to cover one side of the story because they were convinced by the other side that they're on the Right Side Of History, etc. If you make editors responsible for all that then what are journalists? Robots?

> Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not

Yet volunteer bloggers regularly manage to not only read papers, they find specific problems with them.

The core problem here is that journalism as a field culturally accepts very low standards, and has no interest in raising them. Journalists are trained not to think too hard about anything and to distrust anyone who does, which is why independent journalism has such a different flavor to it. During COVID you could go to the legacy media and read a headline like "Lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives" which would quote a press release from a university. Then a few hours later you could go read some blog by some random anonymous dude and get a list of five massive and obvious methodology errors that rendered the underlying paper deceptive propaganda, problems of the sort that you didn't need any expertise to notice.

Normies see this and think maybe people who can't pull off amazing feats of investigation like reading publicly available PDFs shouldn't be journalists?

In journalistic culture not only won't they do things like this, they train their readers and each other to systematically ignore such investigations because they aren't "credible sources". But that's so wrong. They are credible sources, because they systematically prove their claims and over time that creates more credibility than whatever photocopier for academic opinions is being presented by the newspapers today.

What sources do you personally trust?

Not the OP, but this is a leading question that goes in the wrong direction. You can't really trust any source 100%. You need to do your own research and be humble about it. Journalists are good at this kind of work but they make plenty of mistakes (and as the child of Journalists I will also add that they can be total idiots who are more focused on emotional stories than facts). Basic media literacy with a healthy dose of skepticism and humility is necessary to get anything more than urban legends out of the paper.

The problem with "doing your own research" is that it is unworkable as a policy for the masses, as it leads most to settle on believing well-spoken hucksters. Humility to know when you should trust someone else as a guide is necessary until you've developed the personal experience+knowledge to evaluate sources independently.

> You need to do your own research and be humble about it.

It takes me between 30 and 60 minutes to research a short news article in a topic that I'm familiar with. For topics I'm not an expert in it's multiple hours.

I simply don't have time for it. Family, work, and sleep already occupy much of my day.

That's a common objection, yeah, and it's a problem.

One solution is to recognize that, unfortunately, in that case you don't have much reliable knowledge about the world and therefore your default position should be to not try to influence it. Practically that means things like not judging other people, not voting, or alternatively voting for libertarians who don't believe in imposing rules on other people (because if you voted for specific rules, you'd be doing so based on unreliable information).

Luckily you don't have to actually research every single article. It's OK to generalize over time. Rules can also be shared. Here's some of mine: ignore any story about Russia because they're always unreliable especially since the war, ignore any study about science or public health, ignore any claims made by (ex)-intelligence agents, ignore any claims that appear to support woke narratives, ignore any statistical claims about China, ignore economic predictions or really anything that depends on academically developed statistical models.

While in no way a panacea, you might want to check out Ground News (https://ground.news/). They at least make an attempt to point out how different news sources respond to the same stories. Perhaps most interesting are the "Blindspot" sections which show news stories that are not covered by opposing political sides.

Not OP but for me it's not about what sources to trust (blindly? literally none of them), but what type of information you can trust. Naked facts seem to be safe for the time being, context should be assumed to be heavily biased in a particular direction, and opinions are worse than worthless.

Unfortunately I've found journalists and/or their sources often lie about basic facts too, even when those facts are easily checked.

You'd think they wouldn't do this. Probably they do it because they know most people will take factual claims at face value, or the journalists are so sloppy/confused that they themselves don't realize the claims are wrong.

The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked, which allow or encourage open commenting with third party moderation so I can quickly see disagreement, etc. Mostly that means Substacks, these days.

> The sort that provide hyperlinked citations for their claims, which are correct when checked

What makes the citation correct or trustworthy?

Is it turtles (citations) all the way down?

Turtles all the way down, yep. At some level you have to rely on heuristics and just make a judgement call, but the checking at the prior levels still has a lot of value.

Straight news reporting has no lower level, short of your going out and talking to the same kind of people the reporter did.

Commentary can have such citations. Investigative journalism might have citable passages in part, but ultimately, a lot of journalism is itself a primary source. There's nothing to cite, beyond whatever attribution is given for e.g. quotes in the piece itself (which won't be some hyperlink you can go check). Journalists create the things that others cite. If they could produce what they need mainly by reading and citing, they wouldn't be journalists.

News can be checked in lots of ways. If there's a factual claim about some public data, check it. If someone is assigned a job title, is that actually their job title? Does it contain internal contradictions? Does it make claims that contradict knowledge you already have, or things that were previously claimed? All those types of checks are ones I've done before to news stories and found they failed them.

Think about the NYT example I gave above. How did someone discover that their list of COVID deaths had a murder victim in it? Easy: they read the list, noticed that the 6th person was in his twenties, remembered that COVID doesn't kill such people unless they're already dying of something else and stuck his name into Google. That surfaced another news report about the murder. This is basic fact checking but the NYT didn't do it. The data was too good to check, so they didn't.

That murder victim in the C-19 data was only exposed because he was #6 in the list. Imagine if his name+age were buried on page 23/45. Checking each and every name in a list that long is beyond a reasonable standard for fact-checking for an individual journalist.

It was because he was the first non-elderly person in the list, which is an obvious thing to double check because COVID basically never kills people below a fairly high age. That was already well known at the time.

If journalists can't check the claims they're making, they shouldn't make them. The fact that the NYT wanted to make 1000 factual claims on the front page doesn't suddenly mean they don't have to check them. It means they shouldn't pull that sort of stunt. The loss of trust is clearly deserved.

> Mostly that means Substacks, these days.

Yikes.

Any you particularly recommend? Trying to stretch my reading material.