[dalke]

It would be nice to know what that bias might be. For example, "bias towards truth" is different than "bias towards restoring the US to British monarchy."

Mother Jones is of course a politically progressive magazine, so there's a bias in the topics they cover. But that sort of bias says nothing about the quality of the coverage. The Economist is also 'incredibly biased' in what it cover, and they do good job of it as well.

Similarly, Mother Jones wins awards, like the National Magazine Awards.

Quoting its co-editor Clara Jeffery http://www.wnyc.org/story/what-its-when-redditors-ban-your-w... :

> We report from all side of an issue. We do investigations into things that people on the left or the Democrats wish we wouldn’t. And all of our journalism is fact-checked, sourced, and linked through. Facts are what we do, and statistical data analysis journalism is a big part of what we do. So I don’t see that part either. And we don’t really lace our reporting with opinion. It’s more, we’re a shop that cares about the little guy and inequality. So that informs some, but by no means all, of our story selection.

[reality_czech]

I have never, ever, seen Mother Jones do "an investigation into things that people on the left or the Democrats wish we wouldn't." Maybe there was a time that they were more extremist than the Democrats, and that's what they are referring to. They are basically Fox News, but on the left. Both Fox and MJ make you less informed than before because they leave out facts and stories that don't fit their preconceived viewpoint. They seldom straight-up lie, but the way they frame the stories and what they leave out gives you a distorted picture.

You have TONS of more reputable news sources to choose from like the Atlantic, New Yorker, NYT, Economist, etc. With MJ you're just reading straight-up propaganda and it's very distasteful.

In the case of mental health, a lot of things would have to happen before we could get those mentally ill people off the streets. And Mother Jones would oppose many of those things. For example, we would have to be able to commit more people to institutions against their will. We would have to make it harder to sue mental health professionals or else the government would be bankrupted. To really get a lot of them back to work, we'd have to lower the minimum wage to the point that businesses were actually willing to pay for their time rather than use a robot or an outsourced Indian. But that's a lot more complex than hurr hurr Regan was teh Satan, so you won't find that discussed by MJ.

[dalke]

I am confused by your positioning Mother Jones as no more extremist than the Democrats while also saying "They are basically Fox News, but on the left".

I can't tell from that if you mean that the Democratic party is an extremist party, or if you mean that that Fox News is as moderate towards the right as the Democrats are towards the left, or both.

I thought 'Democracy Now' was more like the left-extreme version of right-extreme Fox News, only much less influential. In any cases, shouldn't your comparison be more to one of the conservative print sources? Is Mother Jones more like the National Review or The American Conservative for the left?

From what you wrote, it's hard for me to tell if your statement that the Mother Jones writing "gives you a distorted picture" is because you also have a distorted partisan view.

About the only times I read an article from Mother Jones is when it was submitted here on HN, which occurs a few times each week according to an HN search.

I looked now at several of their investigation pieces, at http://www.motherjones.com/topics/investigations?page=1 , I do not get the same feeling of being "less informed" that you described. To the contrary, pieces like "They Had Created This Remarkable System for Taking Every Last Dime From Their Customers" and "The World Bank Is Supposed to Help the Poor. So Why Is it Bankrolling Oligarchs?" seem like informative, well-written pieces that I would expect from those reputable sources you mentioned. They also link to primary resources, including SEC filings and court documents. That's not something I see from Fox News reports.

The web site lists only a small number of investigations, I can't find an investigation that the Democrats wish hadn't been reported. I instead looked for other long-form pieces.

Five years ago they ran "Why the Democratic Party Has Abandoned the Middle Class in Favor of the Rich", http://www.alternet.org/story/151108/why_the_democratic_part... (first appeared in Mother Jones, but doesn't appear to be online) and "Why Screwing Unions Screws the Entire Middle Class" at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequalit... , which contains among other things the line "The Democratic Party has largely abandoned the working class".

The author of those piece is Keven Drum, who has continued with more recent articles like "Democrats Have Done Virtually Nothing for the Middle Class in 30 Years".

These do not appear to be something the Democratic Party would wish published.

My examination is only cursory, so while I don't see how you reached your conclusion, you have the longer experience with Mother Jones to be a better judge.

[reality_czech]

I believe that Mother Jones is to the left of the traditional Democrat party platform. I also believe that Fox News is to the right of the traditional Republican party platform. In that way, I think the two publications are similar.

Basically, I don't consider either publication a useful source of news. In general, both of them leave out the context that would be needed to understand what is going on in the world. For example, that Mother Jones article about "Why is [the world bank] Bankrolling Oligarchs" leaves out the context of what has been going on in Myanmar in the last few years. Myanmar has gone from being a completely military-run state, to allowing a limited democratic opposition to exist. The World Bank is making investments there partly as a kind of reward for that. If the World Bank left, other countries like China would step in and try to buy influence there with their own equivalent of the IMF (China Development Bank). It invests in bigger companies because it has to, because the managerial overhead of investing in tiny ones would be way too high.

All the same issues exist in our government's aid programs to poor countries. The money does indeed often get siphoned off to the rich and well-connected. But of course Mother Jones doesn't comment on this, becuase the narrative is government = good, World Bank = bad. If facts or context have to be left out to fit the narrative, they always will.

I could go on, but you get the idea. By leaving out facts and, most especially, context, biased news sources like these leave you less informed after you read them than before.

[carapace]

:-) I like both of those publications because they wear their bias on their sleeves. It's easier to extract information when you don't have to also try to reverse engineer the bias.