So based on your citations, "enormous" is roughly a handful between the thirty of them over the last decade?
Get some perspective, do you actually think the WaPo literally made up a story or do you think they (let's be uncharitable) ran with a story they should've done more due diligence on?
> Just because WaPo caught them this time doesn't mean they're wrong, or WaPo is wrong. The past few years have given me a deep distrust of all media.
So just because they made a story up, and lied to reporters in order to spread a lie, that’s not wrong? Jeez, what do you think is wrong? Can you even tell anymore?
That does not provide any amount of substantiation to your claim. Not only is it an anecdotal claim, you're not even relaying the anecdotes themselves!
Also just dropping in to make a blanket (and OT) claim that the WaPo is putting out clickbait "lately" reeks of ulterior motives. If you actually had a substantiative claim about how this particular story is misleading or erroneous that would be another thing.
> But it was misleading enough to shatter the trust of many people, including me.
Which story was so fake that you can't trust them anymore?
Honestly, I think people like you are a big part of the problem. OH you know that places like Breitbart are worse, but you just can't bring yourself to trust the Washington post.
Do you not see how much that sort of attitude contributes to the much bigger problem?
> The Post publishes a lot of disreputable trash that's outright false or unproven, but more and more often, it seems that they release primary sources of information (especially videos) much earlier than other news outlets will, if the other news outlets do so at all.
Interesting... after reading this, I immediately thought: same as Zero Hedge (also often criticised). But then again, that shouldn't be a surprise - basically a lower bar (on accuracy) should result both in lower reaction time, and in more false positives.
A comment to a sibling comment: I personally find lower time-to-publish immensely valuable - I prefer to assess the accuracy of news stories myself (usually considering the original source and how aligned their interests are with the published information), and I find almost no value in the supposedly "trustworthy" media because they're not actually trustworthy to me (besides the obvious political bias, there's also plenty of high-profile non-culture-wars fake news, e.g. Iraqi WMD, Bloomberg's China spying debacle, the current (non-)coverage of Assange, ...). If there's anything I've learned in the past 10 or so years, is that the "experts" are barely any better than myself at discerning what's true or not, and much less trustworthy.
> But come on, really. Pretend it was Trump and Fox
Either there is a factual basis or there's not.
And who are you talking about? Do you have any basis for me saying whatever you are implying? Are you saying everyone says it? Do you have any basis for comparing Axios to Fox? And if it's false for Trump and Fox, isn't it just as false here - you therefore know it's false?
> I obviously can't prove it
There's a lot of territory between proof to empty fabrications. You don't provide any evidence or more than two dots of data on a big graph - which you arbitrarily connect and claim the new line is a trend. Does that person even still work at Axios? In what role? Is there reason to believe they were involved in this article? What about others at Axios - including those directly involved in the article - do they have biases and why aren't they just as likely to affect this article? What about the author or their editor? If Axios had that bias, can you point to other similar articles?
It's absurd to reason, 'this article might reflect well on the White House, therefore it's biased'. Isn't some positive news inevitable?
> God I would love to see what you'd come up with as an example of this.
@jason on Twitter said so explicitly in the last 24 hours, pg said so on Twitter some time ago.
The rest of your comment just illustrates my initial point: abstract statements, ad-hominems and proof-by-assertions.
That isn't to say that the media doesn't have biases or get stories wrong. The problem is that the elites try to use those facts to discredit all accurate reporting that is harmful to their interests. The honest and convincing way to discredit an inaccurate story is to point out concretely how it is wrong, doing anything else suggests that the story is accurate.
> The Washington Post has now retracted dozens of articles, rewritten huge parts of stories, and basically admitted it was all a sham.
To my knowledge it hasn't. I believe they continue to stand by their reporting. It's possible I missed a major retraction but I have no clue why they would have retracted their stories.
> The article isn't saying that. It's in quotes becuase they are reporting the words of someone they've deemed to be a reputable source for the topic of standard administration behavior.
Very good point. My claim: "Stating speculation as fact...." itself could be described as sloppy. To clarify: factually, Politico is printing the words of a third party - it is a fact (presumably) that this person made that statement. The statement itself is speculation stated as fact, but the speaker bears the direct guilt for that, not Politico.
But I'm not pointing my finger so much at Politico for some sort of outrageous bias, in general or in this particular case, but rather the general way that events in reality are communicated to the public, and the way in which this subsequently manifests in society. Even if nothing nefarious has gone on, people perceive reality and the news the way they do (the specifics of which no one fully understands), and I'm suggesting (based largely on observation of apparent beliefs held by people in forums) that narrative and rumor based reporting like this is having a possibly very serious effect on people's perception of reality, the result being some degree of textbook mass delusion or worse in the public, where prior to cable news and the internet the beliefs would generally have been either null or wrong in other ways.
> I provided all the links in the original comment
Right, and I provided none. Maybe if will search I’ll find counter-links. Maybe your links are 100% unbiased and accurate. Who knows?
> and see if this isn't just a little bit ironic
I don’t see irony but I see a confirming fact. The OP is a professional journalist herself, she never claims she is, or always was, free from the political bias she writes about. Quite the opposite, she confirms she has bias herself: “There is nothing more human than opinions and bias. To say we have none is dishonest.” She also admits the responsibility: “Frankly, I don’t blame them. Responsibility for this begins with us.”
> She was given special treatment to report a story that conservatives very much wanted to be true.
I live in Europe and therefore I don’t care too much about US politics. But based what I read on US media, the story seems true objectively. If you’ll read other comments to this HN post, you’ll see many anecdotal evidences.
The first one has “by party” graph, which shows the trend has started around 2006, long before Trump, and while the results indeed correlate with party, the downward trend is same across all respondents.
What happened in 2006? Many things, but one among them, Facebook opened free registration to general public and its user base has exploded. Was 6m monthly users in 2005, became 58m in 2007. Might be related.
> I find the bias, when it exists, is in the presentation, not the facts themselves.
You mean something like a lie by omission? That is pretty easily solved with some form of source control and public pull requests. An equivalent to git blame would be pretty helpful (cue Sinclair Broadcast Group NPC script reading). Just watch http://newsdiffs.org/ for a while, these people regularly modify stories without editor's notes. It is kind of funny that further below you discuss the embarrassing conduct of the media in their coverage of Covington Catholic... do you remember what was in the news cycle right before they breathlessly pounced on a non-story? The media was getting embarrassed by a very rare direct denial from the DoJ in relation to their latest reporting on the Trump collusion conspiracy theory.
I agree with your broader point though: this won't improve the media. They're not even pretending to be unbiased and have no shame in telling laughably obvious lies about the most ridiculous thing - like koi ponds. Their motivation is clear: short sighted servicing of those needing confirmation bias conforming stories. This isn't a scheme hatched in a smoke filled back room, it is just a very foolish business plan.
> Also, political facts / misinformation is very hard to judge accurately. For example, just a few months ago, Politifact was calling the "lab leak" hypothesis a "Pants on fire" falsehood. Now, it is being presented as a possibility. https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2021/05/20/politifa...
Townhall.com is a right-leaning conservative publication, both by their own admission [0] and according Media Bias Fact Check [1]. Due to the political nature of the source, some may ignore Townhall entirely. Rather than cite a secondary source, I would cite Politifact directly [2].
> How does one distinguish between propoganda and universally accepted truth?
One tell is when they quote anonymous sources => propaganda. Another is using unconfirmed reports. Another is when the only source has a heavy incentive to misrepresent. Another is when the statistics make no sense, or do not support the thrust of the story.
>2. It says the Steele dossier is largely discredited - I wasn't aware of any discrediting, let alone total. I don't know why the author thought this spin was necessary for the article.
If you aren't aware of it, that's on you. Frankly it amazes me that people still think it's real.
So based on your citations, "enormous" is roughly a handful between the thirty of them over the last decade?
Get some perspective, do you actually think the WaPo literally made up a story or do you think they (let's be uncharitable) ran with a story they should've done more due diligence on?
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