3 ms·

My apologies. I'll admit I'm a bit too passionate on this subject, and worded things too strongly, sorry! Does the edit fix the problem?

nkurz 9y ago
As a reader who has seen only the edited version, it seems like a great comment to me. Thanks for your perspective!
olivermarks 9y ago
it's sad that someone with real experience and open prejudices/honest thoughts shared about Missouri gets down voted. The Guardian is a UK 'champagne socialist' news organization that devotes a lot of column inches/pixels to appraisals of other societies and is highly opinionated. I read it often, not necessarily a criticism. I'd like to explore north st louis with Ed Pilkington and see his reaction to the residents of that areas feelings towards him..
- IIIIIIIIIIIIIII 9y ago
  An aside about "opinionated", because something I did a while ago gave me a different perspective. As a foreigner (who once lived in the US for almost a decade) I try to keep up with US news. Quite a while ago I actually added foxnews.com to my reading list - because I heard so many bad things about it (I had never even gone there before, but my list of regularly read websites is very small anyway), and I wanted to know just how bad "bad" was. I must say it turned out, in my opinion at least, that the articles are not actually all that bad. (I ignore anything anything from Hannity though - and oh boy, don't ever go to the forums.) Anyway, I find foxnews.com is a great example of finding bias not so much in the articles - but in the topics they select! Which of course is something everybody does. Every newspaper, website, or even private blog has a bias expressed merely in the selection of topics they cover, no matter how "neutral" the articles themselves are. If you just look at the headlines foxnews.com really stands out, but so does washingtonpost.com, which I find almost equally far from the middle of the topic distribution (they are trying way too hard to report every fart of that guy in the White House). My point is, this made it clear to me that no matter how hard you try, you can't help being opinionated because what you choose to concentrate on already is a huge factor, and that I only noticed that my own views are likely based on a similar selection bias when I looked at a very different selection from the one I had gotten used to.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    That's Fox's slight of hand. They appear fairly good most of the time, and as far as what they publish they're generally not too bad when it comes to being crazy, for that you go to Breitbart. However Fox's real sin is their television station, watch Fox & Friends or any of the others and its Coney Island.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    Fox news the website has been making news on other sites in recent months. The website itself had a right lean but was far far more moderate than the tv channel it was based off. There have been recently been far more hard right posts and people have taken note of the changes making it more like the commentary on the tv channel.
  - olivermarks 9y ago
    always good to know different 'news' organizations agendas and to skim widely across viewpoints to decide one's own point of view and perspective IMO
dang 9y ago
It's much better, yes, because you moved the needle much further into personal experience and away from what I referred to as prejudicial generalization. That's the direction we all need to try to go. I know it's not always clear in moderation comments, but the reason we emphasize this is not so much about right or wrong, as about the effects on discussion of certain kinds of comments compared to others—so it's both more empirical and less divisive than it looks. It's hard for a community this large and uncohesive to agree about large things like right and wrong, but a bit easier to find some shared interest in the kind of site HN should be. That's the hope anyway.

nkurz 9y ago

As a reader who has seen only the edited version, it seems like a great comment to me. Thanks for your perspective!

olivermarks 9y ago

it's sad that someone with real experience and open prejudices/honest thoughts shared about Missouri gets down voted. The Guardian is a UK 'champagne socialist' news organization that devotes a lot of column inches/pixels to appraisals of other societies and is highly opinionated. I read it often, not necessarily a criticism. I'd like to explore north st louis with Ed Pilkington and see his reaction to the residents of that areas feelings towards him..

IIIIIIIIIIIIIII 9y ago
An aside about "opinionated", because something I did a while ago gave me a different perspective. As a foreigner (who once lived in the US for almost a decade) I try to keep up with US news. Quite a while ago I actually added foxnews.com to my reading list - because I heard so many bad things about it (I had never even gone there before, but my list of regularly read websites is very small anyway), and I wanted to know just how bad "bad" was. I must say it turned out, in my opinion at least, that the articles are not actually all that bad. (I ignore anything anything from Hannity though - and oh boy, don't ever go to the forums.) Anyway, I find foxnews.com is a great example of finding bias not so much in the articles - but in the topics they select! Which of course is something everybody does. Every newspaper, website, or even private blog has a bias expressed merely in the selection of topics they cover, no matter how "neutral" the articles themselves are. If you just look at the headlines foxnews.com really stands out, but so does washingtonpost.com, which I find almost equally far from the middle of the topic distribution (they are trying way too hard to report every fart of that guy in the White House). My point is, this made it clear to me that no matter how hard you try, you can't help being opinionated because what you choose to concentrate on already is a huge factor, and that I only noticed that my own views are likely based on a similar selection bias when I looked at a very different selection from the one I had gotten used to.
- SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
  That's Fox's slight of hand. They appear fairly good most of the time, and as far as what they publish they're generally not too bad when it comes to being crazy, for that you go to Breitbart. However Fox's real sin is their television station, watch Fox & Friends or any of the others and its Coney Island.
- Larrikin 9y ago
  Fox news the website has been making news on other sites in recent months. The website itself had a right lean but was far far more moderate than the tv channel it was based off. There have been recently been far more hard right posts and people have taken note of the changes making it more like the commentary on the tv channel.
- olivermarks 9y ago
  always good to know different 'news' organizations agendas and to skim widely across viewpoints to decide one's own point of view and perspective IMO

dang 9y ago

It's much better, yes, because you moved the needle much further into personal experience and away from what I referred to as prejudicial generalization. That's the direction we all need to try to go. I know it's not always clear in moderation comments, but the reason we emphasize this is not so much about right or wrong, as about the effects on discussion of certain kinds of comments compared to others—so it's both more empirical and less divisive than it looks. It's hard for a community this large and uncohesive to agree about large things like right and wrong, but a bit easier to find some shared interest in the kind of site HN should be. That's the hope anyway.