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Do people generally find mother jones a quality information source? it has always seemed to me to be a over the line into left-wing-nut territory - willfully

Do people generally find mother jones a quality information source? it has always seemed to me to be a over the line into left-wing-nut territory - willfully misleading to appeal to their market. I'd put it as basically a mirror of fox news on this chart : https://www.codlrc.org/content/news-sources-journalistic-quality-partisan-bias https://www.codlrc.org/content/news-sources-journalistic-qua...

tyingq 9y ago
Is there any news source truly in the middle, high quality and not low volume? I find myself having to read the left version and right version, then approximate the truth. Your referenced chart has NPR in the middle, for example. I do enjoy them, but the left bias seems obvious to me.
- ikeboy 9y ago
  Reason.com
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Thanks...spent 5 minutes on a very brief flyover, but it looks promising. Lightweight site too, didn't notice excessive JavaScript or ads. I really am interested in better sources. Maybe I'm naive, but there seems like there's a reasonable, if not really lucrative, opportunity for someone to produce actual unbiased news in the US. It's worth a few dollars a month to me.
    - fleitz 9y ago
      It's hard to produce unbiased news, news is what's noteworthy, that implies at least curation if not explicit 'bias'. Hence whenever an article gets published, a group of people say 'they should have published something else'
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Maybe I'm naive, but there seems like there's a reasonable, if not really lucrative, opportunity for someone to produce actual unbiased news in the US. Unbiased news is an impossibility. Centrist bias relative to the current position of the Overton Window is possible, but probably not economically optimal since political views aren't normally, or even unimodally, distributed.
      - indubitable 9y ago
        There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost. To give an exaggerated example: ---- - Air strikes in the US killed 15 targets in Mideastland. Representatives for the US armed forces stated the targets were high priority leaders of Al Boom Boom. Domestic news in Mideastland claims that the strike was on a hospital. There has been no definitive identification of the victims yet. - The never ending war machine of the US continues to ravage Mideastland as a brutal attack on a hospital where many women and children were being treated has been destroyed with mass casualties reported. Here's a sad picture of a baby by some rubble that's not related to this incident. - An elite fleet of aerial forces unleashed a precision surgical strike in Mideastland decapitating important parts of the leadership of the extremist terrorist organization Al Boom Boom. Locals were reportedly seen celebrating and toppling a statue of the fascist organization while waving US flags and singing the US national anthem. ---- There will, of course, be an unavoidable bias in what is covered since not it's literally impossible to cover everything. But in how things are covered, removing bias is not difficult and it's also testable. If an average reader can, with reasonable accuracy, state the biases and inclinings of the author of a news piece then it is biased. The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing. Here [1] are a list of online newspaper archives. Most are free and some go all the way back to the 1800s. Compare then and now, and the difference is quite extreme. I expect we're going through a time today that people will look back on with some degree of bewilderment, not dissimilar to how we might think of things like the two red scares we've gone through. We, collectively, seem to lose our ability to think coherently and impartially quite easily, but at least historically it tends to right itself quickly enough. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...
  - hidenotslide 9y ago
    That is clearly a libertarian news site. They may be negative towards both US parties but it's still a right-leaning site, at least in an economic sense of right and left.
    - ikeboy 9y ago
      The question is whether they're biased towards one side. I think they're much less biased than mainstream media on both sides.
      - hidenotslide 9y ago
        I'm not saying they are being untruthful. But they are very clearly biased to the right on economic issues, and significantly more than traditional news. All the articles I saw on regulation and taxes were negative. I probably even agree with them on many things, but they are _not_ unbiased.
        ikeboy 9y ago
        Biased towards an economic position is not the same as being biased towards a political party.
- aaronbrethorst 9y ago
  Journalistic neutrality, or "the middle" as you refer to it, as it is practiced in American media has some serious flaws. Sadly, it still has cachet with a sizable portion of what has been sneeringly referred to as the "mainstream media" for the last few decades. I highly recommend reading Jay Rosen, a Professor of Journalism at NYU, talk about the "View from Nowhere." There was one link posted above, and I'll post another. http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/ http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-question...
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Appreciate it. Am I off in thinking this used to exist decades ago? Reading, for example, the history of Watergate, it seems like there used to be more emphasis on neutrality. Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social.
    - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
      Regarding Watergate, there's a really fantastic podcast series entitled "Slow Burn" that just ended. It's 9 or 10 episodes long, and gives a great 'behind the scenes' look at the entire affair. I can't speak too much to the media's approach to Watergate. > Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social. This article from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has some context on what happened: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/covering-america-journalism-professor-christopher-daly https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/c... One clipping from it: One problem was the drive toward monopoly — or if not monopoly, then what economists call “concentration...” In the news business, this pattern threatens the very existence of diverse, and local, points of view. Clear Channel replaced more than one thousand individual owners, with different aspirations, different ideas about their civic roles, and different ideologies. The number of U.S. cities with healthy, competing daily newspapers, once in the hundreds, fell to about a dozen. By the year 2000, in American cities that had a daily newspaper, 99 percent had only one management in town. The fifteen biggest newspaper chains account for more than half the nation’s total circulation. In all, there were about 1,500 daily newspapers remaining in America. Of those, only about 350 were independently owned, and most of those were very small. The whole industry was heading in a direction that was at odds with the journalistic values of independence, localism, and competition. The article also talks about the vast reduction in budgets for news outlets. This disadvantages organizations that do legitimate news gathering and reporting and advantages organizations that simply have an axe to grind (it's cheaper to spew your opinions than it is to put boots on the ground and see what's up). There's more, but I'm probably getting excessively long for a comment.
curtis 9y ago
This particular submission is a post from Kevin Drum's blog. He was a fairly well known blogger before he started blogging for Mother Jones, and his general political outlook hasn't really changed before or since. So regardless of how you feel about Mother Jones, Drum is kind of his own thing. I don't generally read Mother Jones proper, so I can't tell you how he compares to their regular reporting, but having followed Drum for many years I'd place him squarely on the center-left and no where near left-wing-nut territory.
- SeanLuke 9y ago
  Ever since he was doing Calpundit, Kevin Drum has gained a well-deserved reputation as a thoughtful, highly moderate center-left intellectual. Not even remotely extreme. Lead is his personal hobbyhorse, and something he actually knows a great deal about. So I wouldn't be too dismissive of him.
- vpribish 9y ago
  ah cool, I hadn't encountered him before. thanks!
dtornabene 9y ago
http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/ http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-question... There are other, better, rebuttals but this is from someone who can't really be impeached on ideological grounds. Also, the idea that Mother Jones is "left-wing-nut territory" is ....bad. Unless your yardstick is "distance from more or less explicit white nationalism of breitbart" then Mother Jones is solidly center-left. Finally the graph you posted is pretty bad. The Economist is an ideological chop shop with no bylines that started life as a forum for propoganda agitating against the Corn Laws. The idea that their minimally distant from an axis of "minimal bias" is not exactly born out by the facts.
- vpribish 9y ago
  there's always room for more nuance, but the widely understood left-right model is useful. add more dimensions as needed. on a crude left/right i'd put the economist near the middle: they are far from neutral, but also far from either of those edges.
- tgb 9y ago
  My father is a liberal newspaper reporter and describes The Economist as the best hope for journalism. If you have to stretch to smear it by pointing out the lack of bylines and its start over 150 years ago, then I have to wonder what your biases are. The Economist has its slant for sure but your characterization of it is extreme.
  - dtornabene 9y ago
    Not at all, in fact my characterization of it was pretty restrained. https://www.thenation.com/article/economist-has-slavery-problem/ https://www.thenation.com/article/economist-has-slavery-prob... https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/economist-review-slavery-110687 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/economist-re... https://www.colorlines.com/articles/five-problems-economists-special-report-latinos https://www.colorlines.com/articles/five-problems-economists... I could add in its tolerance if not open affection for Fidez the anti-semitic Hungarian political party, or its virulently anti-union posturing, or its hatred of the welfare state.... I could go on, specifically just about their ideology and how it permeates everything thats published there, but its a lost cause on this website.
hidenotslide 9y ago
This article doesn't seem biased to me, just some statistical information relating to the well known debate about why crime dropped in the late 90's. The lead gasoline theory is an interesting one, in addition to the ones given credit in Freakonomics. Here are some of the theories: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/13/8032231/crime-drop https://www.vox.com/2015/2/13/8032231/crime-drop
refurb 9y ago
From the random sampling of Mother Jones articles I've read I would agree - even the headlines have a definite left-wing bent and you can tell within the first few sentences that the author has a certain world view that everything is filtered through. It's nore of a collection of editorials than actual news pieces.

tyingq 9y ago

Is there any news source truly in the middle, high quality and not low volume? I find myself having to read the left version and right version, then approximate the truth. Your referenced chart has NPR in the middle, for example. I do enjoy them, but the left bias seems obvious to me.

ikeboy 9y ago
Reason.com
- tyingq 9y ago
  Thanks...spent 5 minutes on a very brief flyover, but it looks promising. Lightweight site too, didn't notice excessive JavaScript or ads. I really am interested in better sources. Maybe I'm naive, but there seems like there's a reasonable, if not really lucrative, opportunity for someone to produce actual unbiased news in the US. It's worth a few dollars a month to me.
  - fleitz 9y ago
    It's hard to produce unbiased news, news is what's noteworthy, that implies at least curation if not explicit 'bias'. Hence whenever an article gets published, a group of people say 'they should have published something else'
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Maybe I'm naive, but there seems like there's a reasonable, if not really lucrative, opportunity for someone to produce actual unbiased news in the US. Unbiased news is an impossibility. Centrist bias relative to the current position of the Overton Window is possible, but probably not economically optimal since political views aren't normally, or even unimodally, distributed.
    - indubitable 9y ago
      There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost. To give an exaggerated example: ---- - Air strikes in the US killed 15 targets in Mideastland. Representatives for the US armed forces stated the targets were high priority leaders of Al Boom Boom. Domestic news in Mideastland claims that the strike was on a hospital. There has been no definitive identification of the victims yet. - The never ending war machine of the US continues to ravage Mideastland as a brutal attack on a hospital where many women and children were being treated has been destroyed with mass casualties reported. Here's a sad picture of a baby by some rubble that's not related to this incident. - An elite fleet of aerial forces unleashed a precision surgical strike in Mideastland decapitating important parts of the leadership of the extremist terrorist organization Al Boom Boom. Locals were reportedly seen celebrating and toppling a statue of the fascist organization while waving US flags and singing the US national anthem. ---- There will, of course, be an unavoidable bias in what is covered since not it's literally impossible to cover everything. But in how things are covered, removing bias is not difficult and it's also testable. If an average reader can, with reasonable accuracy, state the biases and inclinings of the author of a news piece then it is biased. The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing. Here [1] are a list of online newspaper archives. Most are free and some go all the way back to the 1800s. Compare then and now, and the difference is quite extreme. I expect we're going through a time today that people will look back on with some degree of bewilderment, not dissimilar to how we might think of things like the two red scares we've gone through. We, collectively, seem to lose our ability to think coherently and impartially quite easily, but at least historically it tends to right itself quickly enough. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...
- hidenotslide 9y ago
  That is clearly a libertarian news site. They may be negative towards both US parties but it's still a right-leaning site, at least in an economic sense of right and left.
  - ikeboy 9y ago
    The question is whether they're biased towards one side. I think they're much less biased than mainstream media on both sides.
    - hidenotslide 9y ago
      I'm not saying they are being untruthful. But they are very clearly biased to the right on economic issues, and significantly more than traditional news. All the articles I saw on regulation and taxes were negative. I probably even agree with them on many things, but they are _not_ unbiased.
      - ikeboy 9y ago
        Biased towards an economic position is not the same as being biased towards a political party.
aaronbrethorst 9y ago
Journalistic neutrality, or "the middle" as you refer to it, as it is practiced in American media has some serious flaws. Sadly, it still has cachet with a sizable portion of what has been sneeringly referred to as the "mainstream media" for the last few decades. I highly recommend reading Jay Rosen, a Professor of Journalism at NYU, talk about the "View from Nowhere." There was one link posted above, and I'll post another. http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/09/18/jennings.html http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/ http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-question...
- tyingq 9y ago
  Appreciate it. Am I off in thinking this used to exist decades ago? Reading, for example, the history of Watergate, it seems like there used to be more emphasis on neutrality. Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social.
  - aaronbrethorst 9y ago
    Regarding Watergate, there's a really fantastic podcast series entitled "Slow Burn" that just ended. It's 9 or 10 episodes long, and gives a great 'behind the scenes' look at the entire affair. I can't speak too much to the media's approach to Watergate. > Basically, that is, we lost something in the shift from printed press to online/social. This article from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has some context on what happened: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/covering-america-journalism-professor-christopher-daly https://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/news-media/c... One clipping from it: One problem was the drive toward monopoly — or if not monopoly, then what economists call “concentration...” In the news business, this pattern threatens the very existence of diverse, and local, points of view. Clear Channel replaced more than one thousand individual owners, with different aspirations, different ideas about their civic roles, and different ideologies. The number of U.S. cities with healthy, competing daily newspapers, once in the hundreds, fell to about a dozen. By the year 2000, in American cities that had a daily newspaper, 99 percent had only one management in town. The fifteen biggest newspaper chains account for more than half the nation’s total circulation. In all, there were about 1,500 daily newspapers remaining in America. Of those, only about 350 were independently owned, and most of those were very small. The whole industry was heading in a direction that was at odds with the journalistic values of independence, localism, and competition. The article also talks about the vast reduction in budgets for news outlets. This disadvantages organizations that do legitimate news gathering and reporting and advantages organizations that simply have an axe to grind (it's cheaper to spew your opinions than it is to put boots on the ground and see what's up). There's more, but I'm probably getting excessively long for a comment.

curtis 9y ago

This particular submission is a post from Kevin Drum's blog. He was a fairly well known blogger before he started blogging for Mother Jones, and his general political outlook hasn't really changed before or since. So regardless of how you feel about Mother Jones, Drum is kind of his own thing. I don't generally read Mother Jones proper, so I can't tell you how he compares to their regular reporting, but having followed Drum for many years I'd place him squarely on the center-left and no where near left-wing-nut territory.

SeanLuke 9y ago
Ever since he was doing Calpundit, Kevin Drum has gained a well-deserved reputation as a thoughtful, highly moderate center-left intellectual. Not even remotely extreme. Lead is his personal hobbyhorse, and something he actually knows a great deal about. So I wouldn't be too dismissive of him.
vpribish 9y ago
ah cool, I hadn't encountered him before. thanks!

dtornabene 9y ago

http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/ http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-question... There are other, better, rebuttals but this is from someone who can't really be impeached on ideological grounds. Also, the idea that Mother Jones is "left-wing-nut territory" is ....bad. Unless your yardstick is "distance from more or less explicit white nationalism of breitbart" then Mother Jones is solidly center-left. Finally the graph you posted is pretty bad. The Economist is an ideological chop shop with no bylines that started life as a forum for propoganda agitating against the Corn Laws. The idea that their minimally distant from an axis of "minimal bias" is not exactly born out by the facts.

vpribish 9y ago
there's always room for more nuance, but the widely understood left-right model is useful. add more dimensions as needed. on a crude left/right i'd put the economist near the middle: they are far from neutral, but also far from either of those edges.
tgb 9y ago
My father is a liberal newspaper reporter and describes The Economist as the best hope for journalism. If you have to stretch to smear it by pointing out the lack of bylines and its start over 150 years ago, then I have to wonder what your biases are. The Economist has its slant for sure but your characterization of it is extreme.
- dtornabene 9y ago
  Not at all, in fact my characterization of it was pretty restrained. https://www.thenation.com/article/economist-has-slavery-problem/ https://www.thenation.com/article/economist-has-slavery-prob... https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/economist-review-slavery-110687 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/09/economist-re... https://www.colorlines.com/articles/five-problems-economists-special-report-latinos https://www.colorlines.com/articles/five-problems-economists... I could add in its tolerance if not open affection for Fidez the anti-semitic Hungarian political party, or its virulently anti-union posturing, or its hatred of the welfare state.... I could go on, specifically just about their ideology and how it permeates everything thats published there, but its a lost cause on this website.

hidenotslide 9y ago

This article doesn't seem biased to me, just some statistical information relating to the well known debate about why crime dropped in the late 90's. The lead gasoline theory is an interesting one, in addition to the ones given credit in Freakonomics. Here are some of the theories: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/13/8032231/crime-drop https://www.vox.com/2015/2/13/8032231/crime-drop

refurb 9y ago

From the random sampling of Mother Jones articles I've read I would agree - even the headlines have a definite left-wing bent and you can tell within the first few sentences that the author has a certain world view that everything is filtered through. It's nore of a collection of editorials than actual news pieces.