6 ms·

“ We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would: * not be

• jeffbee 6y ago
  That's the joke. We already have fact-focused, by-the-book journalism outfits that bend over backwards to present all reasonable sides of debate. These are always characterized as communist propaganda outlets by Trump's allies.
  • kodah 6y ago
    Sure, NPR and Axios exist. I think where Matt is wrong is that Fox, Salon, MSNBC and all the like need to be gone for a while. Their impacts will always overwrite whatever great accomplishments in truth and lack of narrative the other outfits work to establish because they're just another option to the average coffee pounding conservative or liberal looking to get their ideological rocks off on their break or in the car. These are the kind of people who describe nuanced views as "both sides" or claim they're watered down versions of "the truth".
  • Chris2048 6y ago
    > We already have fact-focused, by-the-book journalism outfits Can you name them, and how you verify them as factual?
    • wffurr 6y ago
      We already did. Multiple independent analyses of partisan bias in reporting agree. Feel free to do your own research.
      • Chris2048 6y ago
        I was kind of asking jeffbee since he said it, but I see you provide a list there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25739773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25739773 Which analysts of partisan bias do you consider independent, and why? For example, why should allsides.com be trusted? There seemed to be a point when "fact checkers" started to pop up all over the place, but they also had a liberal bias: www.politifactbias.com
        • wffurr 6y ago
          Clearly the answer is a meta-analysis, but at a certain point it’s turtles all the way down and you need to judge whether you are being fed crap with a modicum of critical thinking.
• zarkov99 6y ago
  No way. NPR is clearly aligned with the Democrats. You have to live in a bubble not to see it.
  • throwaway894345 6y ago
    I agree. I'm a moderate liberal, but I'm aware enough to realize that NPR only frames debates in terms I agree with (and increasingly only in terms that people more progressive than myself agree with). Which strikes me as profoundly unjust considering they are government-funded. I guess I can't muster the short-sightedness required to celebrate the government's wildly disproportional endorsement of my own position. Of course, someone will make some dichotomous argument that it's the progressive position or literal Nazism.
    • zarkov99 6y ago
      America would be in a much better place if more people had your sense. Or perhaps most Americans do and we are just being driven insane because the nutcases are the ones that get all the attention.
    • cudgy 6y ago
      NPR is not government-funded ... it is funded mostly by donations from wealthy listeners and corporations “Only 4 percent of funding in fiscal year 2017 came from federal, state and local governments ...” https://www.newsweek.com/where-does-npr-get-its-funding-calls-defund-outlet-met-calls-donate-1529009 https://www.newsweek.com/where-does-npr-get-its-funding-call...
      • gnicholas 6y ago
        I'd still consider something to be government-funded if they receive millions of dollars in funding from the government (wikipedia shows $200M in revenue in 2016). [1] It is relevant that this is a small portion of their budget, but generally when someone thinks "this shouldn't be funded by taxpayer dollars" they don't stop caring just because the millions of dollars spent only cover a small portion of the entity's total budget. Typically these arguments are ideological/philosophical, not matters of degree. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR
• zkdbsks 6y ago
  Of what NPR pretends to be. Maybe was, I don’t know I only got to the US in ‘07. I remember how furious my professor was at Terry Gross for her (in his opinion rude) interview w/ Jimmy Carter. He otherwise loves Terry Gross. But he’s a “liberal”, so he likes NPR. NPR is pretty brutal if you disagree with them and are well informed about a topic. I had to stop listening to NPR years before Trump came along (yes, there was polarization back then) because they’d make my blood boil with, what I thought, has thinly veiled partisanship. Some of their reporting is just grossly wrong. If they report on anything about Christianity it’s usually riddled with embarrassingly wrong statements. And then there’s three editorial discussions. I’m an immigrant, and I’m embarrassed with NPRs obsessions with telling me how other people outside the US live. A little bit of it is very important, but after listening to NPR for about ten years I’ve learned nothing about the famous “meat and potatoe” Americans. My dad, who traveled to the Midwest for work for a couple decades taught me more about “fly-over” Americans.
• howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
  Not NPR. Not even close. We need dispassionate reporting of apparent facts, emphasis on equal time for both side of every issue/report, and zero editorializing by commission or omission. This is a pipedream sadly.
  • Conlectus 6y ago
    To prod this a bit: Qanon is popular and growing conspiracy theory. Should a news organization covering it spend equal time detailing the supposed evidence of an international satanic pedophile ring as they do discrediting it? If such a news organization became mainstream, do you think this would lead to people being more or less informed? Regardless, I think the "zero editorializing" idea is self-defeating. As others have said; there is near infinite information and finite webpage space and broadcast time.
    • Chris2048 6y ago
      > Qanon is popular Is that true though? What % of Americans support it?
• wffurr 6y ago
  What a disaster every thread about media bias is. People can’t see past the end of their nose about it. They’re all so locked into “my bias is the correct one” that even objective reality seems biased.