Hacker News Reader

Comment by crims0n | Hacker News Reader

I used to go to Ars daily, loved them... but at some point during the last 5 years or so they decided to lean into politics and that's when they lost me. I understand a technology journal will naturally have some overlap with politics, but they don't even try to hide the agenda anymore.

View on HN

Perhaps it’s because politics have “leaned in” to the topics they cover, like the FCC, NASA, the FDA, and EVs.

I'm curious as to what their agenda is? I don't read it very often but I've not noticed anything overt. Could you give me any examples? I'd love to know more.

"Agenda" has become code for "ideas I don't agree with", used by people who mistakenly believe it (politics) can be compartmentalized from other everyday topics and only trotted out at election time.

I disagree. Agendas are real things. Just because they have one, doesn't mean it is inherently bad or even a disagreeable position... but some people just don't like to be "sold to", regardless of the topic.

I'm afraid both are true. And they often go hand in hand. Often, someone calling out an agenda is doing so to sell theirs. (See also "ideology", which is often treated as a synonym.)

For some people perhaps. For me personally, I find some sites purposefully interject their 'agenda', either left or right into their journalism to the detriment of the piece. You're not going to a get a truely subjective view on things anywhere but some places are skewed to the point that you can't tell if vital information is being witheld or under reported.

I got tired of reading about Trump and Elon.

I'm also trying to understand. The agenda is to publish about Trump and Elon? Is that correct?

The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern

Honest question: has he done anything you think warrants good press?

I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.

Apart from articles by the two space reporters, any news about Musk tend to be biased towards being extremely negative.

Aside from SpaceX, has there been any positive news about Musk lately?

Would that excuse being extremely negative about anything that is much less than extremely negative?

That is an incredibly tortured sentence. I'm not really interested in parsing tone in an article, that's very subjective. I would be interested if you could demonstrate that Ars was choosing not to write articles about factual things that would portray Musk in a positive light, but you instead basically said "If you ignore all of their positive factual coverage, they don't publish anything positive about Musk at all!"

I have said that they have a strong negative bias. Whether the underlying news is positive or negative is completely irrelevant. Relevant is that they make things much more negative (= less positive) than they are.

But how does that bias manifest? The only thing you said was that they "ignore neutral or positive stories", and that doesn't seem to be true.

No, I didn't say that at all. I said they are biased, that "they make things much more negative (= less positive) than they are", which is a very different thing. Basically, I'm saying they report x-10 rather than x (that's bias), and you are replying with "so the value of x they report is always negative or 0." No. Wrong.

Oh that was the person earlier in the conversation, okay.

So you haven't really been specific at all. I don't know how I could even try to check if a vague claim like that is right or wrong. But since they apparently have positive spacex reporting and only say other things are negative then I'm skeptical of significant bias.

Again, their SpaceX reporting might be "positive", but that doesn't mean it has positive bias. Apart from that, I previously said the non-SpaceX reporters are strongly biased. Anything about the SpaceX reporting isn't relevant for that.

Gitlin, at least, also slants the negative news. The story on sales about Tesla losing market share to VW, but other outlets reported it as VW gaining the top spot.

They've always had more coverage of Tesla than other automakers, or at least I've always noticed it more. When Tesla was leading EV sales they dutifully reported that, when they're dropping they report it just as well. If anything slanted coverage would be reporting less on Tesla because they are doing badly, which seems to be what you want.

Nothing Trump or his administration has done warrants good press.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/trump-admin-says...

This is the only thing that comes to mind, and Ars covered it.

And is that supposed to be bad in any way?

_Daily_ hit pieces on Elon Musk (or Musk companies), going for something like a decade. These have petered out somewhat since he left DOGE. But they started way back before he should have had that much notoriety.

They were rightfully been calling out the grift at Tesla. On the SpaceX front they've been his biggest cheerleader (even dismissing other stories like the sexual harrassment)

Why should they? There's no such thing as "unbiased journalism", I prefer those that are more open about their politics than those that are poorly trying to hide it.

They shouldn't. They are free to do whatever they want, I am not judging them. I just don't enjoy it anymore so I no longer visit the site.

This exactly.

Politics on Ars makes me think of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. At some level of the decision making process for the publication you have to suspect that not only is being done just for engagement but also that there's no respect for the audience.

Ars is more complicated - I mean, RFK jr. comes out against vaccines - is that sciency or politics? Both? But ultimately they're just playing to the audience in the worst way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com