17 ms·

Thank god someone is writing about this. Recently I've been on the Yahoo's homepage a lot, because of Fantasy Football, and I noticed that a lot of the content

• narrator 10y ago
  They really should filter the news to each person's individual bias. It'd just be easier that way. Cognitive dissonance is real and it can cause serious emotional distress. That's not a good way to drive engagement.
  • vinhboy 10y ago
    You're repeating the false narrative that unbiased news does not exist. There are lots of unbiased news outlets who just report on stories as they come in. I learn about all sorts of government corruption and waste from NPR, NYTimes, WaPO, etc... And relating to current events, I also learn about all the unscrupulous things Clinton did from these sources. I don't need to be inundated with right-wing propaganda be unbiased. Just as I wouldn't spend too much time reading HuffPo or ThinkProgress. No one news source is complete, or 100% correct, but not every news source is credible or deserve our attention.
    • wyager 10y ago
      > NPR, NYTimes, WaPO Not directed at you specifically, but if you think those sources are unbiased, it just means that you're bad at detecting bias. Edit: Haha, this one struck a chord.
      • Natsu 10y ago
        WaPo is one of those doing some fairly shady things, in fact: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699 http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-bernie-list-directory-photos-most-damaging-worst-rhode-island-delegate-fec-jvf/3/ http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-berni... I'm still waiting for them to do a story on their own involvement here....
      • jsmthrowaway 10y ago
        Name an unbiased publication from your perspective.
        • wyager 10y ago
          > Name an unbiased publication from your perspective. https://arxiv.org/archive/math https://arxiv.org/archive/math If you mean a news publication, I can't, because they don't exist. We can maybe go for less biased, but that's a much more complicated question. Sorted by minimal bias, I'd probably just start linking to other arxiv URLs.
          • jsmthrowaway 10y ago
            Edit: The comment this one responded to has been basically rewritten, so my reply is no longer appropriate and I cannot delete it.
            • wyager 10y ago
              I was disagreeing with the OP's assertion that NPR, NYTimes, and WaPO are unbiased. I'm not sure what you expected.
      • 10y ago
  • anexprogrammer 10y ago
    I really don't want that, and try to fight it when I'm experiencing it by reading opposing viewpoints. I want my views challenged, and to have at least a chance of finding out when I'm wrong. With almost any given issue and viewpoint it's what they don't tell you that's the part you probably should know or at least get exposed to.
  • darawk 10y ago
    I genuinely can't tell if this comment is sarcastic or not. And I don't mean that insultingly. It's an obvious conclusion to jump to from the initially rejected premise that hyper-equality of treatment is wrong, but of course it ignores the enormous cost of creating echo chambers. It seems like the 'correct' solution doesn't lie at one of these poles, unfortunately.
    • unityByFreedom 10y ago
      I think he's serious. This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult." We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars. Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals.
      • dlss 10y ago
        Hmm. Now I can't tell if your reply is serious :p As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations. Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me. That online discourse seems to have shifted towards a war of tribes rather than a crowd of individuals is (to me) a tragedy of the highest order. > This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult." I do not think this course of action appeals to me because of a "nationalist mindset," but rather from a desire to see less topics become part of such mindsets. I guess I'd agree with "Create more walls. Partisanship is difficult." (though on the condition that the walls were around already partisan topics, and not in general) > We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars. This is a shocking/wrong statement to me. We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things. Consider HackerNews. Lately it has been taken over by heated discussions centered around political topics, in my model mostly because of the increased outreach due to this being an election year. Once the election passes, I hope, we will go back to discussing technical topics in blissful/ignorant harmony. > Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals. Yes exactly, hence the importance of keeping walls around partisan topics...
  • timehastoldme 10y ago
    Ethically, it's absolutely unconscionable to show people only what they want to see, enabling our worst features to simply fester unchallenged. From a Machiavellian standpoint (read: Thiel or Zuckerberg), this isn't an intelligent long-term strategy, unless your view of how dumb and malleable people are is such that by playing your cards right, so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line. EDIT: could you explain why you want to delete this post?
    • hueving 10y ago
      >so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line. People already know about the filter bubble, but they don't actually care. Most people aren't going to Facebook for an unbiased stream of news and they don't like to feel uncomfortable (i.e. be barraged by things that challenge their core beliefs).
      • timehastoldme 10y ago
        They don't, but they also don't like going to the gym, waking up early for work, or taking out the trash. I think it'll be interesting to see who do and who don't Willpower and motivation fascinate me. I've been living with depression for a while, but I've been able to conceptually reorient myself to embrace my circumstances and find willpower to do the 'I don't want to, but I should' things whenever they come around. But just as I don't think everyone is capable of advanced systems programming, for example, I'm not certain that everyone is capable of strong willpower.
    • 794CD01 10y ago
      The great thing about freedom is that it means other people finding your actions unconscionable doesn't necessarily mean you have to stop doing them. Some people would find it unconscionable that my wife drives and that I "allow her" to do so. The particularly zealous among them might even say that this kind of moral decadence enables our worst features. Although they'd probably find other sins to say that about first before they got to the driving.
      • 10y ago
  • internaut 10y ago
    This is an interesting statement. I suspect this is an excellent heuristic for a media organization to become popular. However I also don't like it because it would limit the range of thought. Most things that I find interesting are at the peripheral or in the cracks, intersections, oddities, peculiar facts. Without countervailing narratives you don't have a benchmark for topic variance, and like the OP, become incapable of believing there even exists alternative models of reality. In a relatively non-partisan example, I find that people who believe in God don't really understand atheists. Surely deep down these people believe in The Creator. I also find that secular oriented types do not really believe that religious people believe. They think they are faking it on some level. These are serious, even dangerous errors. So I submit that we need, require, something I'll label The Truman Clause or Exit from the Matrix. I do not know what that looks like in an ethical information aggregation system. I suspect it exists as part of meta-cognition in either our culture or in the human brain, since one of the most important functions of higher learning is to teach you to question your premises. More so than any elite university I've seen, the kind of culture developed at LessWrong is perfectly suited to tackling these kinds of meta-cognition issues.
• unityByFreedom 10y ago
  > I think tech culture's misguided desire to treat everyone "equally" creates a huge imbalance. You can't put the NYTimes in the same category as Breitbart. Just as you wouldn't compare it to "National Enquirer". I agree. I think we're seeing a sharp rise in foreign "soft power" online in America this election. It's being supported by the evangelicals who will not remove their vote from Trump on the grounds that they really want that supreme court seat. After the election, foreign influence will dwindle. The credibility of such websites cannot be maintained while pushing so much unverified or simply false information. This is the strength of our first amendment.
  • paulddraper 10y ago
    > It's being supported by the evangelicals who will not remove their vote from Trump on the grounds that they really want that supreme court seat. You make it sound illogical. As a religious conservative, I do really want that supreme court seat. The President has to really ask for permission for everything else (laws, budgets, wars, etc.), but justice nomination is very largely his choice. Don't be surprised if that factors heavily in my decision.
    • unityByFreedom 10y ago
      > You make it sound illogical. > As a religious conservative, I do really want that supreme court seat. That factors heavily in the decision. Sorry, that's my bias seeping in. I respect your choice. > The President has to really ask for permission for everything else (laws, budgets, wars, etc.), but justice nomination is very largely his choice. Don't be surprised if that factors heavily in my decision. Not nuclear. He could launch with approval of his self-chosen cabinet, or choose not to defend our allies, resulting in more tensions in areas prone to nuclear war. Personally I think the risks posed by Trump with his thumb on the nuclear button are greater than the lives saved by repealing abortion rights. May God bless you and all of us through these tough times.
      • paulddraper 10y ago
        > Personally I think the risks posed by Trump with his thumb on the nuclear button are greater than the lives saved by repealing abortion rights. 10 to 1 you're wrong. https://xkcd.com/1132/ https://xkcd.com/1132/
• spork2 10y ago
  "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people" Can't find that headline... This was the top result from entering your headline google though http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/05/border-meltdown-obama-delivering-290000-illegals-to-u-s-homes/ http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/05/border-meltdown-obama-deli... There's a pretty big difference between ILLEGAL immigration and LEGAL immigration.
• outlace 10y ago
  Some people say it's impossible to have unbiased news. Of course this is true in a trivial sense, in that anything written by a human with intent to be interesting to read is likely to have some bias. And of course one can bias the news simply by choosing what to report and not report (eg if all you report are all the things fmr Pres. Bush did wrong, then the audience will get a bad impression). However, there is absolutely a difference between journalists attempting to report news in a neutral way and journalists intent on spinning news to forward some agenda, even to the point of using strategic omissions and what not to completely mislead the reader about a conclusion. Moreover, a reasonably intelligent human can (and should) read a variety of new sources (that at least attempt to be unbiased) and generally can get an idea of what actually is going on. When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.
  • gadders 10y ago
    >> When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth. You list three left-leaning news organisations, and expect their biases to cancel out? Wouldn't they reinforce each other?
    • MagnumOpus 10y ago
      It is a sad reality that by now much all "right-leaning" media in the US freely lets unchecked lies permeate their reporting. This is true even for the WSJ's political news, let alone USA Today or Fox News which give equal space to fact and fiction. Pretty much the only readable right wing media is foreign - but if he had suggested The Economist or the Financial Times you probably would have called them left-leaning too...
      • gadders 10y ago
        I'd have thought the WSJ was pretty reliable. I'm not sure whether they permeate lies, but on the other side you have the NYT giving Hilary's campaign team copy-approval on what they write. If you're after other right-wing UK publications you could try the Daily Telegraph or the Spectator.
• gadders 10y ago
  You can't put Breitbart in the same category as the NYT, true, but you could put it in the same category as the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Mother Jones etc.
  • hueving 10y ago
    The NYT editorial board put this on the front page of the paper: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/opinion/end-the-gun-epidemic-in-america.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/opinion/end-the-gun-epidem... They are very upfront about their biases, but they have biases nonetheless.
    • te_chris 10y ago
      But everything has biases. Objectivity is a fib used by bullshit factories like RT to cast doubt over everything. It's not about bias at all, it's about credibility. NYT has credibility, BBC, NPR, The Times of London, Guardian, etc all do. RT, HuffPo, Brietbart do not.
      • gadders 10y ago
        I wouldn't say they have zero credibility, but I would put it on a sliding scale. However, places like Drudge, Buzzfeed have broken stories before so I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand.
      • drzaiusapelord 10y ago
        The Guardian which is extremely left leaning and makes questionable claims like "black torture sites in Chicago." I've been to the Homan station. You can walk in. Its not a "black site" nor is torture done there, at least no proof than some drug addict's claims with zero followup or physical evidence or jury conviction. Worse, the 48 hour holding without charges period which are often claimed to be "illegal" are perfectly legal as per Illinois law. Almost all states allow a 24-48 hour holding period. The "black site" narrative went completely unquestioned in the liberal press. There is zero self-policing here or signs of skepticism with liberal claims. Heck, the "clock boy" was lauded by the liberal press and Obama for being this amazing genius being attacked by racists, when it was a purposeful ruse to get teachers scared to make this kid and his dad celebrities for the purpose of helping his dad's political career and perhaps a big jury payout for "damages" soon. Only hated skeptic Richard Dawkins was remotely skeptical of these claims only to be drowned out on Twitter by liberals calling him a racist. I think a lot of this is liberal bias. Liberals can't see their own bias objectively because they're too close to the problem, the same way conservatives can't see bias at Fox. Guardian, Independent, Salon, etc are just as bad as Brietbart if not worse, because they sell the idea of being 'fact-based' when they're propaganda outlets for a certain viewpoint which generates ad impressions and gets subscriptions via endless outrage, anti-US bias, and pandering to our emotions. Lets stop pretending liberals don't have their army of brietbarts too.
• angry-hacker 10y ago
  For someone outside of U.S, both right (breitbart etc.) and left (huff etc.) are propaganda all the way down . It is your left bias. And the people on other political spectrum feel the same but other way around. Watching American elections is like seeing a freak show. I don't understand who are those people who can support any of the candidates or the media.
  • bartread 10y ago
    Agreed, and sadly not limited to the US. One of the things I (eventually) realised is that here in the UK The Guardian is equivalent to The Daily Mail, but for liberal intelligentsia instead of Conservatives and UKIP supporters.
    • andygates 10y ago
      When has the Graun published bald-faced lies? It has an editorial slant, for sure, but it's not a fountain of factual untruth.
      • Chestofdraw 10y ago
        I've seen this idea pushed a ton recently, especially over on /r/ukpolitics and it seems like nonsense. I think the idea stems from the way the Graun has opened up it's 'Comment is Free' section which has lead to quite a few low quality opinion pieces particularly 'SJW' esq ones. The actual reporting from the Gruan is still good quality in my opinion, certainly head and shoulders above the DMs. And whilst the Graun has its left bias it, quite rightly, hasn't been kind to the current Labour party.
        • bartread 10y ago
          I think that's exactly it, and those are certainly what I see filtering into peoples' social media posts, and many seem at least as toxic as the average Daily Mail piece.
    • retox 10y ago
• jsmith0295 10y ago
  My perspective is that they're basically the same, The NY Times (and CNN and Fox and many others) are just a lot more subtle about it than Breitbart. But fundamentally it's the same thing. There's a pre-established narrative, and they find a way to make everything fit it. If there's something that contradicts it directly they don't even report on it.
  • dhimes 10y ago
    I see it differently. I was around when Bill Clinton was under siege. The "Left Wing" papers (WaPo, for example, was my local) turned on him just like the right wing outlets did. Some sites don't do this. When it became clear that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was misguided, the propaganda sites did not jump on board. When Rumsfeld finally admitted we weren't going to find weapons of mass destruction the right-biased sites changed the narrative and started trying to make other stories dominate the news cycle. It happens on the left as well (watch some of the MSNBC shows). That's the difference. It shows up in the willingness to criticize your own team.
  • matwood 10y ago
    I agree. Sensationalizing news stories has been going on since news was a thing. Each organization picks what they think is important and then makes it as exciting to their readers as they can. My wife is a news junkie. She actually watches CSPAN along with all of the news channels. Sometimes I catch the same story from a few different places, and it is clear they ALL apply their own bias. For a current example, Fox tries to pluck out emails from the leak that show some wrong doing and MSNBC has a story about a leaked email sharing a risotto secret.
• return0 10y ago
  > Something along the lines of "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people"... Well that is not fake, because such a title is unfalsifiable. Both sides use this kind of rhetoric now however, so, in a way the populist right wing has won. The idea of moderation or modesty is nonexistent in US and almost the same holds for UK media. That is wrong, because i believe (and i think one could find enough evidence if interested) that you can convince people by being moderate.
• seertaak 10y ago
  Here's Glenn Greenwald, who can hardly be accused of being right-wing or a Trump supporter, on media bias: The U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, and preventing him from being elected president. I don’t have an actual problem with that because I share the premises on which it is based about why he poses such extreme dangers. But that doesn’t mean that as a journalist, or even just as a citizen, that I am willing to go along with any claim, no matter how fact-free, no matter how irrational, no matter how dangerous it could be, in order to bring Trump down. Although he doesn't name them, it seems to me he's likely referring to the vary news outlets you would consider beyond reproach (say, NYT or WaPo). Does this perhaps make you reconsider your position? EDIT: formatting.
  • mtanski 10y ago
    It seams like in this election even traditionally right learning news papers like the WaPo or WSJ are pilling onto trump. Not to mention countless regional newspapers that have a right leaning edition staff. Bias disclosure: Left leaning, not by my own choice. More centrist, along the lines of the Economist editing staff view of the world. So not by choice, because there's not really centrism left.
    • cmdrfred 10y ago
      I think it has to do the carried interest and the anti TPP comments he has made more than anything.
    • hx87 10y ago
      Hillary Clinton is solidly centrist--Sanders had to pull her to a left a tiny bit.
  • josefresco 10y ago
    What hole do you have to be living in where you don't see or recognize the "media" outlets that support Trump? There are entire networks dedicated to it ... CNN is not the only "media" - get your head out of your ass Glenn.
  • 10y ago
• forgottenpass 10y ago
  And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post Yea, yeah it is. I'm a liberal and can see how HuffPo is trash. I might be willing to grant that HuffPo uses softer titles and hides their outrage/fear/hate-mongering slightly better. Maybe it's not just seeing them as more tame because they're more agreeable to one's politics. But as I was writing this comment I flipped over to both to check their headlines. Right now HuffPo [0] looks exactly like the Drudge Report when they think they've got something juicy. Does nobody else think that font treatment should be saved for a "holy shit airplanes just hit the twin towers" level of importance and immediacy? Spoiler alert: HuffPo is no better than Breitbart. In fact they share a co-founded, Andrew Breitbart. [0] http://archive.is/jAnzR http://archive.is/jAnzR
  • ssully 10y ago
    Huff Post is complete trash, but there is a big difference between fabricated stories and garbage presentation.
    • welanes 10y ago
      Well if we're comparing Breitbart and HuffPo I'd say that they're equally mendacious. Breitbart trades in hyperbole - they will tell us straight up that refugees are mugging grannies which proves Europe has fallen or some such. HuffPo peddles distortion - their articles come wrapped in intentionally misleading statistics, righteous indignation and snark. Both terrible. Both hugely popular. I weep for the web.
  • craigyk 10y ago
    On a lark, I registered as a republican back in 2008 specifically so I could vote for Obama as a republican. That action, however, got me registered to all sorts of conservative mailing lists that initially boggled my mind with how full they are of pure sh*t. At first it was amusing how crackpot and deranged they could be, but it quickly just became sad and/or scary. Since I am fairly liberal, I am also registered to quite a few dem mailing lists, and the comparison isn't even close. The liberal mailing lists and news sources I might describe as having click-bait headlines, or be a bit too bleeding-heart for my tastes, but the conservative side of the aisle is almost pure fear, mis-truths and hate mongering.
• josefresco 10y ago
  I haven't been to Yahoo.com in years, and was intrigued by (and doubting) your statements - low and behold, half way down the page is this: "Voting for Team Hillary is Anti-Christ: E-Mails Expose Plot to Overthrow Authority of Pope, Create Catholic Spring to Foment Revolution & Attack Evangelicals-Who Has Place in Hillary's America?" This goes quite beyond "opinionated" headlines.
  • harveywi 10y ago
    Black propaganda.
  • YCode 10y ago
    Article now says "Editor's Note: This post is no longer available on the Huffington Post.", but you can read the intro on Yahoo.com still.
  • unityByFreedom 10y ago
    That article [1] is intense. "all true Christians must vote for Trump." "Faith Trumps Politics for Faithful People" "Put self aside and fight for Trump to help stop the forces of evil from prevailing" "Trump’s past transgressions, of which he has expressed shame, remorse and apologies, pale in comparison to the revelations we now know about the plot against Christians and the strategy of creating a Catholic Spring, dividing Catholics and undermining the authority of the pope by Team Hillary and the global elite" "Mother Teresa’s nuns are praying the rosary daily for voters to receive clarity of truth from The Holy Spirit and vote for the candidate who supports life and religious liberty (Trump) against the party engendering a culture of death and new atheism disguised as liberalism" [1] http://archive.is/QI4Dq http://archive.is/QI4Dq
• gambler 10y ago
  >And no, this is not me expressing my liberal bias. It's one thing to have opinionated headlines like the Huffington Post Yes, this is you expressing your liberal bias. Huffington Post is Breitbart of the left. They just use a slightly different strategy for pushing their propaganda. The end result is the same: readers with skewed, dysfunctional views of reality. You disagree? Okay. Which major left-wing website do you consider equally biased to Breitbart?
  • craigyk 10y ago
    I don't think there are many "major" left-wing sites that are as full of hate and fear-mongering as a large population of their equivalents on the right. You are falling for the fallacy that both sides fall somewhat evenly on opposite sides of a normal distribution of "truth" or "balance". This is just not true. Changing times have pushed the overall country further right, but this process has also distilled the GOP down to a core of angry, white christian (males?). I don't think liberals are exaggerating that much when they say if Obama was white (or Hillary were a man), 20 years ago they might have been the republican candidates.
• ohstopitu 10y ago
  if this is anyone's particular forte...how would you value articles? - as in, I do agree that a NYTimes's article on adderall has more value to add than say a buzzfeed article on the 10 things that you won't believe are true - but how would you go about working that into code?
• whamlastxmas 10y ago
  Looking at Yahoo just now, at about 50 stories, 7 were strongly anti-Trump and there were 2 that involved Trump but weren't negative (and maybe even slightly positive). I'm seeing the opposite of a right-wing bias. No mentions of HRC.