The media industry ironically has a huge image problem - at its roots is the fact that their incentives do not align with their readership - they've actually made that readership a product to be sold to the highest bidder.
Hunter Biden's laptop was dismissed as a hoax but turns out it's legit
The "election company leaking data to China" thing was dismissed by the NYTimes like the day before the CEO got arrested.
The "Lab Leak" sort of falls under this too
Sometimes the person asking the question is a genuine jackass and sometimes they’re merely of a different partisan persuasion; but if you’re willing to ignore the person and address it, you might find it’s worth checking into anyway.
Jan-Feb 2020 - Masks don't work! don't worry about covid, get a flu shot!
April 2020 - Covid lives on surfaces for 17 days, disinfect all surfaces, also all masks are effective against covid(even cloth ones!)
Early 2021 - Vaccines(pfizer, moderna) will stop symptomatic covid with +90% effectiveness, also you have to have a vaccine otherwise you will spread covid. to others.
Late 2021 - Oops, cloth masks are not effective against covid(omicron), also vaccines for young children wear off in terms of effectiveness after a few weeks.
Hunter Biden had a laptop, but nothing illegal or unethical was on it.
And lab leak remains completely evidence free.
If you have actual evidence to the contrary I'd be happy to see it. But ever time I've asked in the past...
Summary here: https://reason.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-belatedly-a...
Referenced NYT article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
tldr; NYTimes now says the emails have been authenticated. Make of it what you will.
Does it? I'm genuinely not up to date here but the Hunter Biden laptop story was all about the supposedly explosive stuff stored on the laptop and I've still not seen any proof of that.
edit: link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
Great question. What new facts HAVE emerged that caused the New York Times to change their stance on the provenance of these emails? Seems like a story should have been written about that, right? Unless no new facts did emerge, but that would be even more concerning, wouldn't it? That would mean they were either intentionally misleading people or changing their mind capriciously.
It's bizarre to me the way people treat this as a non-issue. I myself wanted the story to be false because I didn't want it to cost Biden the election. I don't, however, approve of being mislead about things, even if I agree with the goals. This is doubly true for a news organization. It's a failure of their primary responsibility.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/hunter-biden-laptop-...
The WaPo one is more technical and the NY mag article is more lurid.
And yet the independents see this much closer to how the Republicans see it. I find that somewhat surprising.
Could be telling us that the most of the (non-Fox) media leans left, and the independents see it but the Democrats don't.
I don't know why this should be assumed. Is there any evidence that independents are more informed than other groups?
A lot of political independents pay very little if any attention to politics, except perhaps right before an election.
What do you mean by biased?
You can probably say that on average, independents are less biased than Democrats in favor of Democrats and against Republicans, and correspondingly less biased than Republicans in favor of Republicans and against Democrats, although this may not apply to some individual independents.
However, I don't view politics as a line. The terms "left" and "right" were based on seating charts in a legislature. The realm of politics and political views is vastly broader than encompassed by relatively narrow range of the American Democratic and Republican parties, and moreover, there are vehement, nasty disputes even within those parties. So in the broader sense, I would say that every individual person has there own idiosyncratic views, which may or may not overlap well with some political party, and the whole notion of being "unbiased" is somewhat questionable.
Let me put it another way: if scientists say the Earth is over 4 billion years old, and creationists say the Earth is less than 10 thousand years old, should we expect the truth to the somewhere in the middle? Should we ask the agnostics?
More to the point, though, I don't know that it matters. I wouldn't expect them to have a particular useful view on the matter or take them as an authority because they're supposedly "unbiased".
Well, yeah. That big jump when Trump got elected isn't because the media suddenly became much more trustworthy and only the Democrats figured it out.
I am a registered member of the Democratic Party.
That said, I am not a fan of either the US Democratic or Republican parties. I find both parties less interested in governing and more interested in maintaining/increasing their power.
But still, I'm a registered Democrat. Why is that? Where I live (NYC), the electorate is ~5:1 D/R. As such, a win in local (city council, Comptroller, etc.) and state (assembly, senate, etc.) Democratic primaries generally assures victory in the general election.
As such, I made the choice a bunch of years ago to change my party registration to the Democratic party.
Does that mean I see issues through "blue-tinted glasses"? I think not.
I'd also point out that I tend to be much more libertarian (small 'l') WRT social issues (equality of opportunity, stay the hell out of peoples' bedrooms and doctors' offices, personal freedom of expression, privacy, etc.), but also a strong advocate of living wages and a very strong government supported safety net.
I have some ideas about why all that is for the good, and have even discussed (especially free expression and a strong safety net) here on HN.
As should be obvious, neither party really supports positive change in most of the issues I find important. One more so than the other, but still woefully inadequate.
Regardless, I choose who I vote for based on my perception/understanding of the candidates' themselves, not which party's line on which these folks are running.
Perhaps I'm an outlier, and folks just vote whatever their family/peer group votes.
I'd say that I'd tend toward a strong belief in the idea that a "well educated electorate is essential to democratic self-rule." (usually, and incorrectly, attributed to Thomas Jefferson, but it's not who said it that matters, but that it's true).
We're falling down on that point (lots of others too, but who's counting?) and need to make sure that by the time an American citizen reaches the age of 18, they understand the US system of government in a reasonable amount of detail, both from conceptual and practical standpoints. You'd think that would be a no-brainer, but apparently (and unfortunately) not.
And that applies to many members of both the major, center right (Democratic) and further right (Republican) parties in the US.
It's a sad state of affairs, but one that's easily fixable, at least for future generations. I'm not holding my breath.