Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

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My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow works. You may not even be aware there is one. There is. It usually accounts for a lot of this. Not perfect, most systems are not - but it goes a long way to providing better reporting.

Think of it from a coding point of view.

Many people think that some developers write code directly on production, to their personal style, and thats it. That certainly happens.

Other teams have coding standards, style standards. Tabs versus Spaces. CamelCase for Class names but something different for variables?

The commit their code, and do a pull request and someone else reviews it. Edits are proposed or demanded. Code is reviewed again, then maybe it goes to production. Its been known for production code to have issues, but generally after going through a process most are prevented then if the developer was able to merge in code without review.

The larger orgs I mentioned have a involved editorial process for editing stories.

> My point is that you do not know how the editorial workflow works.

I think you have it the other way around. The bias is institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias point of view out of the organization.

Look at how tightly political leanings are tied to news outlets.

If it were as easy and objective as you say we would get a lot more random pieces out of outlets instead of the rather rigid ideological publications we see in existence today.

Even Reddit subs and hacker news, which are much more random than news outlets, have pretty clear political leanings. With sufficient samples you can even break down the subgroups within the community.

News orgs don't have nearly the internal diversity required to possibly remove such bias. They are homogenous.

>> I think you have it the other way around. The bias is institutionalized so deeply that the process makes it essentially impossible to get a non curated with bias point of view out of the organization.

That appears to be your opinion, likely that of many here. However thats not how it works.

I have worked in media for 20 years and have had the opportunity to see how many editors, newsrooms, and publications in general work. I have sat in editorial meetings where coverage and stories are discussed. I have been present when editors and writers go back and fourth on stories.

The problem is that for any given news org, you and most people do not know what it takes to publish a story at some of these places. Thats NOT a criticism of you - I think we'd all be better off if folks knew how it worked.

So, does the representation of said news room consist of a group that votes in line with the same distribution as the general population or does it lean significantly to a single side?

Money is on, it was homogeneous. Which means, You can't even see your own biases as other points of view were culled in creating and nurturing the org structure.

> Its been known for production code to have issues, but generally after going through a process most are prevented then if the developer was able to merge in code without review

One more point.

Companies never ever have evil anti user dark patterns enter production because of code reviews, do they?

The analogy only goes so far.

That said, I believe you're thinking of Fox News.

I see that bias

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