Honestly mate, you need to find better news then. It's out there, but it's not 24/7 stuff. The GP is right, there are vastly more good, professional journalists than the celebrity-style 'It-girls' on the networks.

There's plenty of political reporters doing excellent work. Get off Twitter and turn off cable news, they're a mess. But outside of that world there's no shortage of professionals who take the work seriously AND go through a fact checking process.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22146480.

> caught on camera acting in an extremely partisan manner

I'm sorry, but even as political talking points go this makes no sense. He made a "cut" gesture during a live feed, but live news broadcasts cut from one feed to another dozens of times per hour, and the feed he was motioning to cut wasn't of any particular importance to either party (it was a Trump lawyer listening to someone off-camera asking a question). That's hardly "extremely partisan".

Please don't take HN on generic ideological and/or partisan tangents. It just leads to predictable flamewars. Also, please don't post insinuations about brigading unless you have some objective basis for doing so. Perception of these things is notoriously (if not entirely) unreliable. That's why we have a site guideline about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Like any large, widely distributed community, HN is divided on any issue that society is divided about—or rather, societies, since it's also a highly international site. Moreover, HN is a non-siloed community [1], unlike most places on the web, so you're more likely to encounter a cross-section of things you don't normally run into. Ironically, this more unbiased distribution of views is precisely what creates the feeling of bizarre contingents, brigading, and so on, because users aren't accustomed to running into perspectives from outside their usual demographic segments. This is something we all experience online.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I think the problem is that you're associating people calling out media bias and corruption with Trump. I explicitly said the white house has issues too. Major issues, tons of them. That doesn't absolve the mainstream media, there are a lot of valid things to critique there.

You think you never encountered them, but if you consider all right wing people to be bizarre then they're probably not going to talk to you about politics, are they? HN isn't brigaded. It's just a place where you're exposed to more of what people really think without caring if you attack them.

As for demonstrations of media bias, well, do you think the media isn't biased?

Here's an article that covers a series of severe factual errors in the New York Times, caused by the political biases of the institution:

https://unherd.com/2020/01/what-has-the-new-york-times-got-a...

It's by no means complete. I've seen total falsehoods be printed in the NYT about Britain quite a few times and they didn't make the list.

> Here's an article that covers a series of severe factual errors in the New York Times, caused by the political biases of the institution:

I don't have the expertise necessary to evaluate this myself. Two issues that jumped out at me, however: unherd doesn't mention that some of the articles they criticize are opinion pieces, and if you Google keywords from their first takedown you'll find more nuanced coverage.

From that I'm (possibly unfairly) categorizing the article you linked as likely of minimal value, and didn't read it through.

What do you do when it's the NYT Editorial Board themselves writing the Op-Ed that gets facts wrong?

The older I've gotten, the more I've read news stories that are directly related to me, my industry or people I'm in regular contact with. The percentage of these stories that are demonstrably false even on a basic fact checking level is 100%. In most instances, the reporting tells the exact opposite story from the events that happened and every single part of the story is misrepresented.

I started to see this a lot with Vice and BuzzFeed but it's crept into WaPo and most notably the NYT. I can't trust the Grey Lady anymore.

FYI, all the articles I clicked on in the link that started all of this were opeds by people not associated with the nytimes.

Does it matter? What separates some random blog on blogspot from an op-ed in the NYT? If it's anything at all it should be that the op-ed is higher quality and more likely to have its facts in order. That clearly isn't the case at all, and that correctly degrades the brand of the entire newspaper. If they're willing to publish claims that are transparently false in their op-eds section why would it be any different in their news section? They already established that factual accuracy is optional.

> If they're willing to publish claims that are transparently false in their op-eds section why would it be any different in their news section?

Because op-eds are for controversial positions that are of public interest but aren't supported well enough or neutral enough for a news article. That's the definition. If it's clearly true you won't find it in an op-ed in general in any newspaper.

I'm sick of people who can't be bothered to look up terms they don't know using them to spuriously attack institutions that are crucial to our liberty in America.

OK, let's rephrase. Why have op-eds at all? I understand why 30 years ago. But today anyone can publish online. The op-ed appears to be an obsolete institution that's now seriously degrading trust in news outlets.

If bias and inaccuracy was random then "it's just interesting blogs" might be an acceptable way for op-ed sections to go. When the problems trend obviously in one direction it becomes clear that the entire organisation has an agenda.

crucial to our liberty in America

As you may have guessed, I'm not American, and I'm sick of meeting Americans who have completely bizarre and distorted views of the UK because of the factually inaccurate nonsense they read in this supposedly high quality "newspaper".

I wasn't speaking to that article specifically but at the lax stewardship that the NYT is under right now.

NYT Editorial Board members do write Op-Eds of the sort I mention.

"but if you consider all right wing people to be bizarre"

Let's again define the terminology here. I'm a conservative. Many of my friends and peers are conservatives. We traditionally would be "right wing". Only what has been co-opted as the right wing are an absolutely bizarre collection of group-thinkers who have circled the wagons around the abomination that is Donald Trump and tied their ego and identity to defending the same. It is absolutely bizarre, and hopefully will be studied for decades, in the same way that we study other maladies.

Never before has conservatism been so absolutely...deplorable. To be something to rightly be ashamed of.

"Here's an article that covers a series of severe factual errors in the New York Times"

A small selection of articles about Britain. See, I don't expect the NYT to have perfect coverage about Britain, nor do I expect Wired to have technically correct coverage of neural networks. Nor, for that matter, do I expect the NYT to be faultless -- thousands of articles a day, every day. Some of them are going to be wrong.

Thank you for saying this. It was the case when I first joined HN that many posts were quite conservative. But here, and frankly across the US, there has been a shift to voices that are indeed deplorable.

I admired Jim Lehrer no end. But a person can wonder if the rules alone are strong enough to withstand the assault.

No. Rules alone are not enough without moral character on the part of the reporter. Lehrer showed moral character in proposing the rules, and even more in acting on them in a consistent manner. But without the moral character in the reporters (and their managers), the rules are just wallpaper.

OK, so you consider some people to be bizarre, and you claim you don't see them in real life. Well, they're there. You know they're there because the turn up and vote. They just aren't talking to you. My point about HN stands.

By the way, Trump isn't all that conservative, is he? He doesn't seem to care about deficit reduction for instance.

I don't expect the NYT to have perfect coverage about Britain, nor do I expect Wired to have technically correct coverage of neural networks.

Then your standards are much lower than mine. I do expect that if a news outlet writes about a topic, basic facts which can be checked using 5 minutes on Google have been checked. Otherwise what's the justification for that companies existence? Why should I subscribe? I can get blogging anywhere.

>Just yesterday George Stephanopoulos was caught on camera acting in an extremely partisan manner [1]

To be fair, Stephanopoulos was a Democratic operative for years before transitioning to media. Why would you expect him to not be partisan?

I wouldn't but I also wouldn't expect a political operative to become the chief anchor and political correspondent of a major network.

The problem I see is that no one can agree on what is right or the truth any longer. What one side considers the truth might not be the same for the other, look no further than the impeachment proceedings.

I'm amazed that we've reached a point in the USA where we can't agree on some simple truths anymore.

> The problem I see is that no one can agree on what is right or the truth any longer.

I don't think this is a new problem in politics at all. In my earliest memories of observing politics I remember being outraged at the convenient redefinition of words. Politicians are basically advocates for an agenda (most of them are even trained attorneys). And most everything they do and say is designed to further that agenda. Character is secondary and will not be what gets them elected/re-elected.

>I'm am amazed that we've reached a point the in the USA where we can't agree on some simple truths anymore.

I'm curious. Can you give one or two examples of the 'simple truths' that we can't agree on anymore?

>What one side considers the truth might not be the same for the other, look no further than the impeachment proceedings.

The impeachment proceedings are interesting examples because I truly believe that objectively, even if the facts are as stated by the Democrats, it would be a gross abuse to remove Trump from office for that. It's bonkers. Trump's conduct, at best, warrants a Congressional censure. But I take your point one two sides looking at the same event but interpreting it vastly differently. The Kavanaugh nomination was the same way, as well as coverage around Covington kids (could not believe as it was happening that news reports would profile children in the way they did).

"I'm curious. Can you give one or two examples of the 'simple truths' that we can't agree on anymore?"

"Should Trump be impeached for leveraging military aid to require an investigation into local companies in a nation that was ostensibly interfering in American politics, when the target of said investigation is a political opponent, thereby creating an obvious conflict of interest"

"Should Hillary Clinton be charged for communicating sensitive information using persona devices, or deleting information requested by the FBI during the subsequent investigation"

These are really hard issues actually.

If you stand outside your hatred or love for these people, and stand outside of your own political preferences, they become considerably more nuanced and difficult than we'd care to admit.

They are not black and white enough to have easy answers, and so, we get narratives, misinformation, and polarisation.

One simple truth in dispute is that vaccines save lives and do not cause autism.

See also “anthropogenic climate change is real”

Thanks that's a perfect example.

That Stephanopoulos example of partisan behavior is an incredible choice, especially when you then claim that the White House is "hardly faultless". Given that you could randomly choose virtually any second of Fox News coverage and have a much worse example, still you chose this?

Stephanopoulos was giving directing clues for his own talk program. There is positively nothing "partisan" about that, however partisan he may be. The White House, on the other hand...well let's not even go there.