Truly shameless plug for a personal project that does exactly what you suggest by clustering news articles from multiple (reputable) news sites; prioritizes highest quality articles, and shows the headlines. It's really interesting to see headlines on the same story side-by-side and see the bias that comes with it. Helps me stay just a bit more centered and see multiple sides of often complex stories.
You're right of course. Though I could also just change "shameless" to "shameful" as you rightly did and we'd be all set. Thanks for making the comment too - made me stop to think about another strange English idiom.
This is fascinating! I love the duality presented side by side, how they react in a completely different manner to the same topic. It's also a bit sad, because it reminds me of the pressure to colour news with more opinions, take stances, etc - very rarely will you see the style of dry, "just the facts" reporting.
It appears they build the feeds based on a simple keyword filter - for example, under "guns" and "liberal outlets" we have a post about a guns and roses concert... :)
“Just the facts” is a weaker play than a “hot take” when you’re competing for attention. And if you’re not driving some people away with your reporting, then you’re probably not strongly attracting their opponents, so it pays to take sides. However, I think news organisations could be opinionated without necessarily presenting opinion as fact.
* So many headlines are truncated. This is distracting.
* The "What they both should probably read" section should be motivated. For example, what makes WSJ or BBC better? They are both known to occasionally publish dreadful articles.
* You are missing "left-wing Breitbart" The Guardian, I believe they have a fairly large readership.
You won't find a direct equivalent to "Black Crime" on The Guardian, because left-wing and right-wing rabble-rousers have a different M.O. Rightwingers write prejudiced headlines under the guise of being anti-PC, and often with the goal of riling up their perceived enemies. Leftwingers put out victimized and/or sanctimonious headlines talking down to their readers. In terms of biased content, they often both favour the same tactic: lying by omission, although I have to say I only see rightwingers opting for "bold faced fabrication". The "black/minorities/immigrants crime" thing is a good example of lying by omission, where the omission is other demographics and/or other context. But if you think only the right does that you are not paying attention.
The Guardian itself has both facepalm-inducing articles ("Men rarely catcall me any more. I hate that our culture makes me miss it" <- Yes, this is a real article. That title was so roundly mocked they had to change it, but you can still Google it), and editors dedicated to slapping the most obnoxious title possible on otherwise decent articles. An example that comes to mind was a fairly long article by an American-Iranian who had left Iran as a child due to religious persecution, and felt trapped into a life-long "refugee" role in the US, which she thought she should be able to grow out of. Or as The Guardian titled it: "The ungrateful refugee -- We have no debt to repay" (it's only missing the all-caps to be in full Daily Mail mode); this sure helped the perception of that article or the point its author was trying to make. On the other hand it probably generated a lot of clicks and outrage.
I have been reading The Guardian on and off since the 1990s, I remember a time where it was an opiniated, left-wing, and no-nonsense newspaper. For a while now it has slowly drifted into click-baiting tabloid realm and tribalistic political allegiance (cynically, I believe: based on their comment sections a lot of people are hate-reading The Guardian). It has used the lowest common denominators of US media dicourse as templates, and applied them to its own output in an effort to widen its appeal, at the cost of its integrity. I don't think this should be excused.
To be fair, on the left something like salon.com is more desserving of being compared to Breitbart (in the "foaming at the mouth" department), however I think The Guardian's treatment of news is, if anything, more insidious and damaging. As opposed to Salon/Breitbart, they still have real journalists that may investigate major stories (Snowden files, Panama papers), and that veneer of real journalism is then used to prop up bonker articles telling us how "erasers teach children to be ashamed of failure", or ask if "you are too white, rich, able-bodied to be a feminist". Still on their front page today, this gem: "For Trump and the US right, breaking the nuclear taboo has always been thinkable". "The US right" was in charge when the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1 & 2, and Afghanistan were taking place, if they were nuke-mongers I think we would know by now -- but hey let's accuse half of the political spectrum of wishing for nuclear holocaust, what's the problem? Anyway. So. Maybe I should have compared them to Fox News instead.
You wrote quite a long text, but none of it supports the equivalence of Breitbart and the Guardian you’re trying to defend.
The two examples given are somewhat strange in that they seem to skew to the right. Sure, they’re examples of bad journalism, but it’s not comparable to the campaign style propaganda operation of Breitbart.
Huh. I actually gave, like, five examples, argued why it's not possible to have a clear equivalence, and concluded that Fox News would have been a somewhat more apt comparison?
It's interesting that you view some of the examples as right-wing though.
Both The Guardian and The New York Times are quite intelligent and useful publications. In fact I don't see what is gained by reading NPR, BBC, or Reuters instead.
On the other hand, while The New York Times gets chastised here as liberally biased, the Washington Post is listed as neutral, whereas I see the reverse as being the case.
I agree. That point specifically made me distrust the site's categorizations: just read the headlines from Washington Post vs New York Times and it's obvious which one is more exploitative/clickbait-centric.
I hope that's something that can be fixed though, because I do love the idea of this site...
You know, I dont have any strong opinions on the websites themselves. If enough people agree with this classification,I dont mind trying it. This thread has already been super helpful
You're clearly in a liberal bubble. I'm not conservative but the bias on The Guardian and NYT is obvious; I can't stand reading them.
The biggest difference between them and Breitbart is the subtlty - they do a good job looking smart and give lip service to opposing viewpoints. They also have much better reporters, designers and editors. All that actually serves to make their bias more dangerous though.
I will certainly concede to preferring liberal publications.
To your second point, though, I don't feel too manipulated by them precisely because I don't seek them out to confirm my own bias, but instead because of the high quality reporting. I admit that I only read The Guardian for the occasional book review, but I singled out the Washington Post in contrast to the NYT for its shameful clickbait tactics. I would easily read the Wall Street Journal over the Washington Post.
I haven't read enough Breitbart to know if it would be fair to call them a right wing version of the NYT in some loose sense, but it's not like they are winning Pulitzers with original reporting. Unlike the NYT, I'm not sure that you'd find much high quality, original reporting if you filtered out the slant. I admit I could be totally wrong here, but I always assumed that Breitbart was more of a right wing blog akin to DailyKos, than an actual newspaper (despite being presented as one).
"What they both should probably read" is going to be controversial. I am thinking through what goes in there and what criteria I should use. I dont have any strong opinions about the ones that I have so I will move it around based on feedback and consensus.
I think Guarding should be there too. Adding it soon
I can't help but gasp at how tragically the american political spectrum is skewed. I mean, looking at it from europe, breitbart is "crazed right wing extremists", obama is center-right, and the guardian is center-left.
It isn't a question of validity, but rather a semantic dispute as the US spectrum has shifted to the right quite a bit during the last half of a century (it’s quite easy to see remnants of the red scare to this day). And you are left with a two-party system, both very liberal economically, but one who is reactionary & openly religious-backed while the other arguably tries to be liberal in other social facets.
Yes, Europe is a big place, but the US is too, and it's quite common to travel a few hundred kilometers in europe and see a completely different political situation. Of course they are still large tendencies (synthesized into european parliament groups), but they really don't mean much and more importantly have no decisive power on their own.
The Guardian isn't particularly left wing. Try libcom.org, ROAR, In These Times, Jacobin, Dissent, maybe Current Affairs. This tool is correct in calling things like nytimes, etc. "liberal", but that's the center of the political spectrum, not the left wing.
An interesting project, but one that seems to suffer from a (presumably unintended and unknown) conservative bias itself, as evidenced by opening the page and seeing conservative opinion outlets like Breitbart and Drudge displayed literally next to reputable sources like the New York Times and Politico
FWIW I don't think the point is to compare reputable v non-reputable -- after all, perception is truth in politics. I think the goal of the tool is to highlight the perceptions but not to sort through the realities. There are great tools that do that (i.e.: Snopes/Politifact) but people 'in a camp' aren't generally interested in a truth that doesn't fulfill their prophecy.
You nailed it. I dont agree with most of the stuff on the conservative side but I think it is a bad idea to shut ourselves off and not listen to ANYTHING they say. This site simply shows you what the other side is listening to and hopefully it will soften everyone's views in the long run.
Not really discussing it. I just got fed up yesterday and I made this in a few hours out of disgust. The idea was born out of softening my own views I guess
If you want to soften everyone's views (and for this to be mainstream), then choose a different domain name. It can't be stated on radio or television in the US, for better or worse.
I think it depends on one's definition of "mainstream news". Traditionally and I think most commonly understood, it means news that is published in widely circulated newspapers, and on accessible television.
The times are, of course, a changing. Almost all newspapers in the UK at least have, today a really low circulation number. They are widely available, but hardly anyone buys them anymore. The Guardian, for example only sells 156 thousand copies.
Looked at this to realize I only read Reuters nowadays and ignore other news sources because Reuters is pretty financial-report-talk bland and thats how I think news should be.
Yep. I've pretty much given up all news except the Australian Financial Review and am a lot happier for it (though for some reason I'm back on HN after many years... bad move)
Thanks for taking a stab at helping us fix discourse, every stab is needed! Are these RSS feeds from different websites or is the tool doing some manipulation of the data (i.e.: attempting to line up coverage of a single topic to do a one-to-one comparison of how the left v right covers it).
RealClearPolitics https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ has done this sort of thing for years. Every other headline is sourced from conservative or liberal news source.
The RealClearXXX sites are my main entry point for news; the format is ideal and I don't know anything as well curated. However they definitely have a slight conservative bias, evidenced by their selection of articles and op-eds.
63 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadTruly shameless plug for a personal project that does exactly what you suggest by clustering news articles from multiple (reputable) news sites; prioritizes highest quality articles, and shows the headlines. It's really interesting to see headlines on the same story side-by-side and see the bias that comes with it. Helps me stay just a bit more centered and see multiple sides of often complex stories.
http://enclude.com
</shame>
It appears they build the feeds based on a simple keyword filter - for example, under "guns" and "liberal outlets" we have a post about a guns and roses concert... :)
* So many headlines are truncated. This is distracting.
* The "What they both should probably read" section should be motivated. For example, what makes WSJ or BBC better? They are both known to occasionally publish dreadful articles.
* You are missing "left-wing Breitbart" The Guardian, I believe they have a fairly large readership.
Breitbart had a section up until a few weeks ago titled "BLACK CRIME". Can you show me a "left-equivalent" section in The Guardian?
If anything, Breitbart is a "right-wing" NaturalNews.com.
You won't find a direct equivalent to "Black Crime" on The Guardian, because left-wing and right-wing rabble-rousers have a different M.O. Rightwingers write prejudiced headlines under the guise of being anti-PC, and often with the goal of riling up their perceived enemies. Leftwingers put out victimized and/or sanctimonious headlines talking down to their readers. In terms of biased content, they often both favour the same tactic: lying by omission, although I have to say I only see rightwingers opting for "bold faced fabrication". The "black/minorities/immigrants crime" thing is a good example of lying by omission, where the omission is other demographics and/or other context. But if you think only the right does that you are not paying attention.
The Guardian itself has both facepalm-inducing articles ("Men rarely catcall me any more. I hate that our culture makes me miss it" <- Yes, this is a real article. That title was so roundly mocked they had to change it, but you can still Google it), and editors dedicated to slapping the most obnoxious title possible on otherwise decent articles. An example that comes to mind was a fairly long article by an American-Iranian who had left Iran as a child due to religious persecution, and felt trapped into a life-long "refugee" role in the US, which she thought she should be able to grow out of. Or as The Guardian titled it: "The ungrateful refugee -- We have no debt to repay" (it's only missing the all-caps to be in full Daily Mail mode); this sure helped the perception of that article or the point its author was trying to make. On the other hand it probably generated a lot of clicks and outrage.
I have been reading The Guardian on and off since the 1990s, I remember a time where it was an opiniated, left-wing, and no-nonsense newspaper. For a while now it has slowly drifted into click-baiting tabloid realm and tribalistic political allegiance (cynically, I believe: based on their comment sections a lot of people are hate-reading The Guardian). It has used the lowest common denominators of US media dicourse as templates, and applied them to its own output in an effort to widen its appeal, at the cost of its integrity. I don't think this should be excused.
To be fair, on the left something like salon.com is more desserving of being compared to Breitbart (in the "foaming at the mouth" department), however I think The Guardian's treatment of news is, if anything, more insidious and damaging. As opposed to Salon/Breitbart, they still have real journalists that may investigate major stories (Snowden files, Panama papers), and that veneer of real journalism is then used to prop up bonker articles telling us how "erasers teach children to be ashamed of failure", or ask if "you are too white, rich, able-bodied to be a feminist". Still on their front page today, this gem: "For Trump and the US right, breaking the nuclear taboo has always been thinkable". "The US right" was in charge when the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1 & 2, and Afghanistan were taking place, if they were nuke-mongers I think we would know by now -- but hey let's accuse half of the political spectrum of wishing for nuclear holocaust, what's the problem? Anyway. So. Maybe I should have compared them to Fox News instead.
The two examples given are somewhat strange in that they seem to skew to the right. Sure, they’re examples of bad journalism, but it’s not comparable to the campaign style propaganda operation of Breitbart.
It's interesting that you view some of the examples as right-wing though.
On the other hand, while The New York Times gets chastised here as liberally biased, the Washington Post is listed as neutral, whereas I see the reverse as being the case.
I hope that's something that can be fixed though, because I do love the idea of this site...
The biggest difference between them and Breitbart is the subtlty - they do a good job looking smart and give lip service to opposing viewpoints. They also have much better reporters, designers and editors. All that actually serves to make their bias more dangerous though.
To your second point, though, I don't feel too manipulated by them precisely because I don't seek them out to confirm my own bias, but instead because of the high quality reporting. I admit that I only read The Guardian for the occasional book review, but I singled out the Washington Post in contrast to the NYT for its shameful clickbait tactics. I would easily read the Wall Street Journal over the Washington Post.
I haven't read enough Breitbart to know if it would be fair to call them a right wing version of the NYT in some loose sense, but it's not like they are winning Pulitzers with original reporting. Unlike the NYT, I'm not sure that you'd find much high quality, original reporting if you filtered out the slant. I admit I could be totally wrong here, but I always assumed that Breitbart was more of a right wing blog akin to DailyKos, than an actual newspaper (despite being presented as one).
"What they both should probably read" is going to be controversial. I am thinking through what goes in there and what criteria I should use. I dont have any strong opinions about the ones that I have so I will move it around based on feedback and consensus.
I think Guarding should be there too. Adding it soon
If you think Breitbart is too far right to be mainstream, check the identity of the guy in the White House and think again.
If you think the Guardian is too far left to be mainstream then check the identity of the previous guy in the White House.
Also I note that "Europe" is a big place and quite politically diverse.
Yes, Europe is a big place, but the US is too, and it's quite common to travel a few hundred kilometers in europe and see a completely different political situation. Of course they are still large tendencies (synthesized into european parliament groups), but they really don't mean much and more importantly have no decisive power on their own.
May I suggest that Breitbart is politically full English and The Guardian is politically granola?
[1]: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/breitbart.com
The times are, of course, a changing. Almost all newspapers in the UK at least have, today a really low circulation number. They are widely available, but hardly anyone buys them anymore. The Guardian, for example only sells 156 thousand copies.
Is there a way to show the diff?
As done by 'RealClearPolitics'. One topic, two articles, one pro and one con.