Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

> But partisanship is only relevant if it affects reporting,

It does, here.

> which by your statement would seem like we are of opposite convictions.

I have no idea what you mean.

> without leaving anything out, and I have yet to see anything hinting otherwise.

I don't share your belief. Haven't you seen his hit-piece on third-party candidates? You had two big candidates with little or no integrity, and yet, he paints the third party candidates as not even worthy of consideration because they said one or to silly things, or were unaware of some details.

> why would that in any way affect their Trump coverage (if still factual)?

Would you react the same way about an anti-Hillary piece magnifying her every flaw, when her opponents are just as (or more) flawed? I'd not bat an eyelid if such things were coming out of party propaganda mouthpieces. I feel very differently about it coming out of HBO.

> Is it somehow disingenuous to report on Trumps blatant lies?

Not even remotely close to what I wrote.

> when comparing these statistics

The statistics are garbage. There is no science there. Politifact has some value in that they do some legwork to find primary sources. Readers can read those sources and come to their own conclusions. Think of Politifact like Wikipedia: you can find a good number of primary sources linked from there. But like Wikipedia, they are not the final authority on these matters. Politifact's choice of topics to investigate are not representative of a person, and their verdicts are often whimsical.

NYT started reported on wikileaks emails very late in the revelation process. This already shows dishonesty on some level.

It also coincided with release of emails that didn't actually matter, thus the narrative was - hey she is just human and yes there is some bad, but nothing that terrible.

For example, they didn't report on leaking questions to debate organizers until Donna Brazile got fired. I think people lied on both sides, but I always assumed democrats were better than that. And I used to take my news from New York Times. Now I can't because I know they'll try to present just one side of every issue.

Finally, an example of bias is I am yet to see a single positive news story on Trump from NYT. Like they did a story about him hiring lobbyists. All commenters on the site and the story itself tried to say that he is being hypocritical since he promised that he would get rid of lobbyists. They didn't cite his reasons for that decision that he talked about on the 60-minutes interview.

The story about him firing all lobbyists was instead merged into the "campaign is in disarray" story.

But biggest problem for me is that any tech site I go to, I am constantly bombarded with "Trump is evil" and I never hear his side of the story.

I mean half the time the bias is so bad, I actually think I'm reading the onion (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-steak-well-...)

If you go to Wired, they currently have an article on the front page that starts with:

"Mark Zuckerberg is trying hard to convince voters that Facebook had no nefarious role in this election. But according to President-elect Donald Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale, the social media giant was massively influential—not because it was tipping the scales with fake news, but because it helped generate the bulk of the campaign’s $250 million in online fundraising."

This is a) bias as they're not being impartial and b) it is saying that allowing people to post whatever they want is "nefarious".

Basically, this one-sided approach is what I think drove people to twitter/facebook for news in the first place.

This is why I just don't bother reading most news articles because even when the news isn't from a fake site you still have many factual errors or context being removed from specific events/quotes/reports/etc that are discussed in any given article. This is an issue larger than just some kid putting up fake news on a site to generate clicks for ad revenue. It's an issue that includes what I would consider established news outlets like the major newspapers and magazines. It's just weird to see how often the news is so bad in terms of fact checking that often I just skip news altogether.

The show was about Trump, and only about Trump. Why would they bring up anyone else?

And stating that Trump made those statements is true, saying that others also make idiotic statements does not change that.

Politifact is infamous for their bias. Here’s an example of them rating the same exact statement very differently, depending on who made it:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jul/...

http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/jun/20/do...

There are numerous studies that also show significant selection bias, that is they cherry-pick statements they fact-check.

Politifact itself makes no attempt to evaluate and correct for their own bias. The newspaper that runs it is liberal leaning, and has endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Because of the fact that Politifact tries to appear unbiased, their apparent bias is even more disappointing. Truly neutral fact-checking is something that would be very desirable. Perhaps the only way this will ever happen is by some sort of aggregation of left- and right-leaning “fact-checking.” Sort of like metacritic.