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.