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Comment by daveaiello | Hacker News Reader

As someone who lives in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania that Stu Faigen calls home, I say that half of the county, which is about 325,000 people, should agree but will disagree because of how strident his politics generally are in favor of politicians and causes from one side of the aisle.

I say "his politics" but I mean his and those of the other contributors and staff of the Bucks County Beacon. It is a who's who of radical-left Bucks County politics.

You can't look at the decline in journalism in our country without looking at how one-sided the coverage provided by the journalists has been for the last 40 or 50 years.

If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.

Who knows how that would have affected the secular decline to this point?

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> If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.

Or they'd have no paying subscriber base because everyone is pissed off at them.

I prefer sources that just report on local happenings (including the activities of our local government) and am fortunate to have at least one that is non-partisan, but I don't think their success is assured, especially in an area that leans far in one specific direction.

In this case, the area in question very much does not lean in one specific direction. Which makes it unclear what journalists that do lean far in one direction are trying to accomplish in such an area.

They are pandering to the portion of the population that does lean in a specific direction and wants to participate in an echo chamber, which seems like it should be a tiny number of people to me but organizations like Fox News (and all the knockoffs that sprung up to reach people who feel like Fox News is too "fair and balanced") continue to prove me wrong.

Given what I said above, my point was that a significant portion of the local population will remember the negative articles about their side from that outlet and avoid it, leaving them with the depressingly small number of people who either don't consider themselves to be aligned with either party or actually want to read unbiased reporting.

In addition to just writing about what they believe personally, the business case is that you can capture more subscribers pandering to one side than you can pandering to no one.

One of the greatest failings of journalism over the last bunch of decades has been that it takes too much of a neutral (or capital-oriented) position. You can follow this from the scores of puff pieces on the Vietnam War being, like, totally under control, dude, straight through to the modern endless refrain of "well, Steve says the Earth is round and Bob says the Earth is flat, but it's up to you to decide :)". Incuriosity and hypercredulity of access-journalists saving up trivia for their book deals, all with the "noble" goal of appearing "neutral" - it's been the death spiral of Western democracy.

Perhaps my choice of the phrase "neutral political position" was not what others would have chosen.

I am trying to take a fact-based perspective in what I say and do.

Facts don't belong to either dominant political party in the United States.

The person you are responding to doesn't acknowledge that the Democratic Party represents the left wing in US politics, presumably because they aren't beholden to the small far left portion of its constituents.

I wouldn't spend time trying to justify your stance to him, which is a very reasonable one IMO.

You're putting words in my mouth that aren't there and I don't really think you're abiding by the "assume good faith" policy that HN sets out.

How else would you suggest communicating to a population that fundamentally does not share your views, other than with neutrality?

As a Bucks County native, the Beacon is not at all representative of the median voter. Oh, certainly there are some aligned with it, but there are just as many with the opposite views, and most are in between. Journalists that don't respect those people in the middle, that disagreement, have no chance of being listened to by them. They have every right to voice their opinions, but if journalists only respect the people who already agree with them, then we're all just going to stay in our bubbles.

Journalists shouldn't "represent voters", they should represent truth.

This breaks down when one half of a two party system goes all-in on lying.

Reality has a left wing bias because reality is fact-based.

To take a "neutral" political position in this environment is to accept blatant lies. Journalism should be a pursuit of truthful information, thus being "neutral' politically is untenable if you want to do actual journalism.

It's true that might not always be the best for your subscriber numbers. But some folks do, actually, care about the truth.

I don't think the OP is saying he has an issue with the reporting of facts. I think what he's getting at is that a lot of what passes for news today (especially online) are really just op-eds.

Presenting just the facts is being politically neutral, but only when it's just the facts. Providing commentary on the facts is not. I don't think it's all that crazy to say there's been an obvious left-leaning bias in that regard for the last 10-20 years.

Congratulations, you've bought into the fascists' framing.

Whenever the media doesn't present the fascists' narrative unchallenged, it's declared that they're being biased. Doesn't matter what the facts are, the accusations still come.

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