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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Newspapers and other media have always had a political slant. But the more respected media have maintained rough factual accuracy because it enhances their impact and so their political slant.

What's happened is that the income of media outlets has declined to the point that most can't get factual accuracy even if they want it.

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I'm not sure that's true. I think that media has always had some inevitable inaccuracy, but it's only been in the past 20-30 years that people have had enough information to see that inaccuracy. Back when there were a dozen newspapers on the newsstand and 3 TV channels, there simply wasn't anywhere to see any information outside the mainstream media. This wasn't necessarily malicious or intentional; it was simply a reflection of culture and the type of people who worked in newsrooms. With the invention of the Internet anyone could easily find alternative sources of information. Sometimes those sources were more accurate than the mainstream, sometimes less. Nowadays there isn't a "mainstream" of media because there's so many sources, and the group labelled as "the mainstream media" is simply a group with similar biases.

Or to put it another way, the media's accuracy rate has stayed consistent at some value less than 100%, but if all three TV channels reported the same information then it looked like they had 100% accuracy. Once there were more sources of information then it became apparent that the media's accuracy was less than 100% despite their protests to the contrary.

The result is that the media landscape is fractured. A person can live in a bubble where all of their news sources (eg NYT, WaPo, and Bluesky for one bubble; Fox, Newsmax, and Truth Social for another bubble) all report the same information, making their accuracy appear to be 100%, while any single source of information outside the bubble that disagrees with the bubble is disagreeing with a bunch of apparently 100% accurate sources and so can safely be discarded.

The solution is to realize that no source is 100% accurate or unbiased even despite genuine efforts to be. That isn't to say that some sources aren't more accurate or unbiased than others, but you should apply some base level of skepticism to any and every source

Your claim that media outlets are no longer factual because they can't afford paying to be factual seems specious. They often make egregious errors that take a 5 minute Google to correct.

Instead of facts being unaffordable, it seems that lies and bias simply pay more (or at least the media outlets seem to think so).

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