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Comment by scheeseman486 | Hacker News Reader

Conservative leaning newspapers weren't always total dogshit and good reporting is good reporting, regardless of ideology. This is a belief that you don't seem to share, given you make out ideology to be the problem as opposed to the quality of the journalism itself. Very shallow thinking and it's a perfect exemplification of poor media literacy.

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Good reporting is not skewed by ideology.

Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides.

Good reporting is not about demonizing your perceived enemies while excessively praising your idols.

"Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides."

Nonsense. Good reporting is about carefully filtering the evidence and reporting the essential stuff. Sometimes that's heavily skewed to one "side" or the other. What's suspicious is when it's always the same side.

This is more precise but you probably mean the same thing. Just that discussion has degraded toward the idea that there are always political sides to every fact, the "everything is political" crowd.

Unfortunately, in today‘s world facts are interpreted as ideology. Take climate change: with the given scientific consensus you don’t need to „present all sides.“ A factually correct report will present the consensus. And still, some people will take this as „ideological.“

There is no "scientific consensus" on things like the Israel-Palestine war. It's incredibly difficult to be impartial on some of this type of issues.

You could say humanism is the absolute variable good journalists could stick to, but the Guardian seems to be going beyond that, deeper into the left ideology.

I'm still a big fan, regular reader and supporter of the Guardian, but I do at times skip over some of their more openly leftist pieces.

Journalism isn’t getting one person to say it’s raining and one person to say it’s not raining. It’s to look out the window and report reality.

You look out the window and see rain. I see light drizzle. A journalist writes about meeting a subject of his article in a "raging autumn storm".

"Reality" is subjective and not always so easy to observe. What about political debates, economy, social issues? I don’t want to read a journal that tell me "this politician said that", but one that tells me _why_ they said it, in which context, if this is "right" or wrong, why, what does the other side says, etc.

(all of this thread resonates well with my last HN submission btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538847 )

If reality is subjective it must be objective too.

With all due respect, this strikes me as a middle school opinion on how media should work.

> Good reporting is not skewed by ideology.

You can't not have a perspective. You can be upfront about what your perspective is, while giving reasonable time to other perspectives.

> Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides.

Here I think the school-age lessons about what is fact and what is opinion does us all a massive disservice.

> Good reporting is not about demonizing your perceived enemies while excessively praising your idols.

If you can make a good argument supporting your demonization or praise, why not?

I believe you are wrong about what quality reporting is about. Journalism degraded because of the economic situation they find themselves in, but also because the school of journalism degraded. Maybe as a reaction to economic woes, but it certainly didn't not revolutionize the craft and instead did away with some quality aspects.

> school-age lessons

You could elaborate on this "argument", but we would probably disagree about the problems of modern journalism.

> If you can make a good argument supporting your demonization or praise, why not?

Because this is a more or less proof you didn't write an article to inform the reader and that you had other aspirations. You also lose the trust of your readers, but of course you always can work from the minima some papers find themselves in. Boulevard can be economically viable.

Be that as it may, to be a successful journalist is difficult today. And if you are too successful, you probably have a lot of enemies in your own trade.

I'd put the Telegraph as the right wing equivalent of the Guardian. Biased in the opposite direction but relatively reliable too.

The telegraph is split brained where the reportage is excellent and the comment and opinion is the worst, shrill, reactionary.

The Guardian can have that tendency as well.

It _used_ to be, possibly, but it really went off the rails a bit during Brexit.

and what they do have in common (although the guardian has become less so recently) is that they both do publish some opinions that greatly dissent from their editorial line.

The Telegraph pumps out a lot of culture war trash now. You could argue the guardian pumps out a lot of socially liberal stuff, but I'm not sure it actively engages in culture war stoking.

The Telegraph has long been compromised: https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/peter-ob...

Having James Delingpole as climate change denial columnnist also is really unimpressive.

The Telegraph has become only one rung better than a tabloid... The Financial Times has taken the mantle for reliable, centre-right information, even if their focus is a bit narrower.

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