Hacker News Reader

Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

Also, doesn't this just turn WaPo into WSJ that harps on these pillars everyday? This doesn't seem like a very sound market decision either.

It's always funny to hear about media bias with obvious very large alternatives available. It was very eery hearing about the Media's supposed Liberal biases through the 2020 and 2024 election campaigns with Fox News fully dominating viewership numbers [1]. And now here we go again with print media.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/cable-news...

View on HN

I think it's conflating a bit two ideas. Number of outlets vs number of viewers. I feel an argument could be made for either case, selectively.

If we assume, for example sake, the country is exactly 50% left and 50% right, it makes sense that Fox, as the sole 'big' right wing news would dominate ratings.

Then you have CNN and MSNBC as left leaning outlets, so they outnumber Fox, but split viewership. According to the link above, if they merged, they'd have about the same viewership as Fox, which makes sense.

And therefore, any argument that there is some kind of liberal bias is false (whether from Trump or Bezos). That's my point.

In reality, CNN and MSNBC ideologically agree as much as FoxNews and Newsmax in that they don't. And CNN especially invented optimizing coverage for attention over viewpoint consistency (esp between 2000 and 2015).

Well, from your viewpoint, sure.

But if we pretend that only those three exist(obviously they don't, you have ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, and many, many more), it's not necessarily wrong to say that media has a liberal bias, since '67% of stations are left leaning.' It just leaves out the fact that nobody really watches them in numbers.

If a bunch of news outlets all share a certain viewpoint that doesn't actually help them get viewers, maybe it's just because that viewpoint reflects reality and not because of some grand conspiracy. Assuming reality is consistent, you should expect news sources to agree on most of the facts on most things, and not because of a bias towards anything other than what a "fact" is

The problem is that none of those stations are left leaning. At most they are centrist/liberal.

CNN owned by TimeWarner/Discovery is also pivoting toward not publishing anything negative toward Trump.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/anticipatory-obedience-bassin-p...

What's an example of that pivot from CNN's website today?

From the citation

> What do you think of our coverage?’ ‘Were our reporters being too hard on the White House and Trump?’ ‘Should [CNN chief executive] Jeff Zucker be replaced?’ It was nothing explicit, but I got the drift.”

Okay, but what's a real world example of that happening on CNN's website today?

A real world example would f what didn’t happen? Putting your thumb on the scale is a lot more subtle.

That’s just like asking for evidence that Chinese media isn’t biased about saying anything negative about the government.

Or you could simply find plenty of criticism of Trump on CNN's website which would invalidate the concern.

By putting the thumb on the scale doesn’t mean they never say anything negative. Even Fox News will occasionally criticize Trump. It means being more careful about not being overly critical

So.. CNN is doing good, well sourced journalism?

Are you really defending CNN when I just posted citations of the boss wanting to be careful not to offend Trump?

You still haven't provided a single example that the desires of the boss are actually being reflected in the operation of CNN.

Jeff Bezos wanted the Washington Post to go soft on Trump. Here are concrete examples of his interference:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/25/jeff-bezos-killed-washington...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/03/washing...

Now your turn.

https://www.tvinsider.com/1171396/cnn-trump-jim-acosta-wolf-...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cnn-plots-bury-anchor-trump-04315...

> MSNBC as left leaning

Are they not in favor of Democrats? How is that left leaning?

They're leaning left from the perspective of the extreme right. To everyone else, they're just the leftmost portion of the rightist blob.

This is clearly incorrect. MSNBC is pretty strongly left / progressive.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. MSNBC tends to advocate for liberal positions which, while on the left side of right wing, is still a right wing position. You don't see them advocating much for social democracy let alone more extreme forms of socialism.

If you set your 'center' at your personal position, instead of the center of the population as a whole, you get weird results.

I.e. to someone else, Fox News isn't advocating to deport all non-whites, therefore they're just the right side of the left-wing blob.

In real life, left-wing means left-wing relative the population, not relative to you personally.

If we define left wing in terms of the population as a whole, then there is a huge portion of the population that is opposed to neo-liberal & far right positions and there are no major media organizations that represent them. That's the point that I am attempting to make.

Most people in the US have not encountered the 'left'. Democrats, do have progressive wing but in general they are center-right/right while Republicans are far-right at this point. (Even ignoring the Nazi salutes at Republican rallies).

By "everyone else" you mean literal socialists and communists trying to pretend that they are still on the map and haven't been far outside of the Overton window for at least half a century. Seriously that rhetorical whine is as obvious as unironic use of "Bourgeois" and "Proletarian" framing.

CNN is not relentlessly partisan in the same way that Fox and MSNBC are. Keep pushing on that Overton window, though. It's a good hustle.

right I agree. Fox and MSNBC are relentlessly one-sided, though if you fact check the two you'll find that Fox is -heavily- the leader in misinformation. CNN has actually gotten quite a bit more centric and it's easy to spot partisan people who act like they're shills for the Democrats. Another good source is AP News and BBC .

The only host that is centric is Scott Jennings. The other hosts are clearly far left.

Like it or not, the Overton window in the US did shift last election.

So many comments trying to compare to Europe, or try to excise liberal from left seem to miss the point.

When an election so divisive picks a side, there's your new baseline. Not what it was last year. Not what CNN did in the Clinton years, or what it's claiming to do today.

That’s comical considering CNN is the same network that promoted and pushed all of the Trump hoax stories. They also claimed Biden was mentally fit up until that lie was also exposed. CNN has no credibility in the news space.

CNN definitely isn't left leaning. Debatably even MSNBC is largely more liberal than left leaning.

As I see it we have one major right wing news network in America in the form of Fox; along with some smaller ones like One News Network and talk radio. We have several centrist news networks like CNN and ABC. We have several neo-liberal news sources like the New York Times.

However, we have no truly left wing mainstream news and only one major network (MSNBC) that is marginally left wing.

So it seems to me that America's media is biased towards the right whether you are counting number of outlets or number of viewers.

And American left is pretty right by European standards. The democrats as a whole would definitely fall under the right camp here. Mostly the neoliberal one.

Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America.

> Someone like Bernie Sanders would be central-left here. But he's pretty much an exception in America.

No he wouldn't, have you seen his policies? He is more left wing than even Scandinavian countries, he wants the Employee funds that Sweden tried in the 80s and never went back to because it was too extreme left for them.

Employee ownership isn't that weird though? Most top execs get paid mostly in shares and options. Employees often have this option too. In a socialist view there would be no stock market at all.

The Scandinavian countries aren't very left wing. They're just very rich so they have lots of money for welfare programs. But they're pretty anti immigrant. I would consider Spain more left wing.

That was true 15 years ago - especially with Merkel/Obama/Cameron - but a lot has changed since then.

The European right and American right essentially speak from the same ideology. As the Republicans have moved away from free markets, free trade and immigration. Trump, Farage, Weidel and Le Pen could all work happily in coalition together.

The European left has become so fractured that it's hard to make clear comparisons. Which German political party would Bernie Sanders want to join of SPD, Greens, or Die Linke? In the UK would he work with the SNP, Labour or Corbyn?

Would you consider Germany's CDU/CSU to be close to the republicans in the US? I pegged them more as being Democrat's equivalents. Macron is also more of a US democrat then a republican.

Is an odd fit I would have him with Labour. In canada he would lead the NDP.

That’s tricky- I’d say the modern CSU/CDU & Macron are closer in social policy to the Democrats but economically closer to the Republicans.

Looking at the CDU’s manifesto I think it’s overall more palatable to the Republicans. As the Democrats would likely never support corporate tax cuts or cannabis restrictions.

https://www.cdu.de/app/uploads/2025/01/wahlprogramm-cdu-csu-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com