Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Ste_Evans 2369 days ago
These seem like fair points. So there's definitely plenty of room for improvement at NYT. Do you mind me asking if you have a similarly prepared spiel for Fox News? Didn't they claim the American President wasn't actually American for years? I know this is whataboutery, but I suspect NYT is one of the better media outlets in the US despite the failings you've pointed out.
1 comments

I’ve don’t read or watch Fox News regularly so I don’t know. The NYT may be one of the better papers, but I don’t find it crosses the threshold of being worth reading.

I don’t really trust the news. I’ll read the Chicago Tribune or Bloomberg to get a general sense of what’s going on, and then try to research specific topics based on primary sources. I really like National Review. Unlike the NYT, NR is explicit about its viewpoint. So even though, for example, I support keeping the ACA, I can read an NR article on healthcare policy because the authors “show their work” in terms of how they perceive the facts to fit into their (generally conservative) take on the issue. That at least gives me a basis for researching things further. But with the NYT, I feel like I’m just constantly being manipulated, and because the NYT is so terrible about citing sources and data, I don’t even really have a starting point for further research.

This is an excellent point about transparency. Not just the NR which is very transparent, but on the other side you have mother jones and democracy now and the like. Those claiming to be purely objective and without bias, NYT for example, are the dangerous ones. Many of the readers don’t think there’s any bias in NYT coverage. Scary. As you said, good authors “show their work.”