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Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

their.news

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Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#61
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a couple of observations: firstly, it's interesting that the Guardian is considered to be dead-centre, while most in the UK would say that it's quite on the left. I found that surprising. Who? Both Ad Fontes and AllSides say that The Guardian merely skews to the left, and Ad Fontes' analysis concludes that it's one of the "most reliable". (Ad Fontes' analysis here: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-…

People aren’t great at distinguishing comment and editorial from the news. It’s probably true that the Guardian’s news is centre-left, as you say. However their comment and editorial is usually pretty far left (Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, etc), and that’s what gets noticed and gives them this reputation. https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/

I'd say that it's essentially all editorial at this point.

It strikes me as several waves peaking at the same time. One being normal civilization cycles that result in political violence, another being a death of professional standards in reporting. To be fair, some eras of broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers were just as manipulative as the modern ones.

A practice I try to stick to is to read non-Anglosphere (and particularly non-US) newspapers only. For one thing, the rest of the world appears to keep on keepin' on and isn't overly concerned with the minutiae of US palace politics or the Chauvin trial.

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be libertarian, because libertarians believe that corporations should have the right to do basically whatever they want that doesn't physically infringe on another's own freedoms to do whatever they want. Facebook banning content on "their yard" does not hurt anyone because it's their property. Therefore on a spectrum this would be Right - Libertarian. Conservative on the political spectrum states: Right-wing po…

That's an interesting interpretation and I like it, even if I disagree! There is nothing libertarian about censoring someone. Sure, you have the right to do that, given they're on your private property (on Facebook) but that screams authoritarianism: it's like Facebook is his own little country ruling on his citizens and limiting their freedom. Now, the act of advocating for Facebook to be able to do what it is curre…

It's always the edge conditions that are the interesting ones.

How does an anarcho-capitalist deal with issues like village commons, natural monopolies, winner-take-all business models, national borders, etc?

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a valid consern. I get the rating info from adfontesmedia, so I do not judge the poltical views of each outlet and what is condisered to be left/center/right. There is no moderation what so ever (that can be a good or bad thing). But the website definelty still contains a few bugs so that might be the issue you are running into. Could you elaborate a bit on your second point. I am not quite sure I fully under…

Not sure about your sorting filter, refreshing the "center" sources is giving me some OAN, Epoch Times, New York Post, Breitbart, Daily Kos, Gateway Pundit - maybe "center" is a mix of everything? It should probably be just sources from the top center 1/3 of the chart at adfontesmedia

That's a known bug

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#64
This a pretty cool idea although the problem of defining 'right' and 'left' sources obviously rears it's head (who will watch the watchers).

It made me re-remember an idea I had a while back. It would be an interesting exercise to take a New York Times news story and re-write to remove POV to the best of your ability. Perhaps add important details that they left out. Fer sure change the wording to remove loaded words and phrases. Get a couple of dozen friends to help out and you could do your own private newspaper.

It doesn't deal with the problem of purposefully unreported stories or your own bias creeping in, but would be a fun thing to try.

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#65
post #9

Hi all, I have the feeling that in the last few years all political discussions have become more extreme. People from the left think that all the people from the right are evil and vice versa. Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue. That's why I built "Their news". With "Their News" you discover news from the entire political spectrum without any filter bubbles. My recommendation is that you try out different…

Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?

Because if you actually stop to look at 'their' side and compare the news stories to 'your' side, you'll find both sides are full of exactly the same kind of loaded subjective language, usually written in the same adversarial tone and distort truth in some way to fit an agenda.

In some cases you can literally take a story from one side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the other side.

https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#66
post #41
post #28

This is a noble goal, but when I clicked on the website a few times (admittedly, only looked at about 10 articles) I ended up with a very "left" view. I do not think it is skewed by personal views -- you could see clearly who is considered evil just from the title. Also, not to knock down the effort, but I think this can cause more outrage, by showing that the other side "is wrong" than grow sanity. Just due to the f…

well reality is famously known to have a 'liberal bias'

Depends, I saw CA counties banning people from the beaches during the spread of an indoor airborne virus.

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#67

This a pretty cool idea although the problem of defining 'right' and 'left' sources obviously rears it's head (who will watch the watchers). It made me re-remember an idea I had a while back. It would be an interesting exercise to take a New York Times news story and re-write to remove POV to the best of your ability. Perhaps add important details that they left out. Fer sure change the wording to remove loaded words…

Take a look at the methodology used by Ad Fontes Media (which this site uses as part of the "left vs right" scale). It's fairly scientifically rigorous, given an inherently subjective topic. My only critique would be that a larger team of analysts might be better.

https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#68
post #10

This reminds me of a 1980s magazine called World Press Review. WPR would take a number of topics every month. For each topic they would print a number of editorials from various points of view. Each editorial was accompanied by the source's masthead and a short note about the source's political perspective. For the most part they used the labels each source used to describe itself (conservative, libertarian, socialis…

> The real world is not binary left/right. It's more like Princess Mononoke, with the wolves, the boars, the apes, the Imperial soldiers, the humans of Iron Town, the human raised by wolves, and the last Emishi prince.

Not familiar with the reference, but I get the idea, and mostly agree. But particularly in places like the US where there are only two “real” parties it seems that most of the groups will ally with each other, even if otherwise vehemently opposed and form two vague alliances which you could perhaps classify as left or right if you so wished.

This is even more frightening to me as I realize you can’t trust anyone’s words and see certain factions “courting” other ones (and perhaps in my view, very dangerous ones) in attempt to fight the other side while still trying to claim ideas incompatible with those they’ve allied with and help provide power to.

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#69
post #56
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK; I don't think there's anything to the left of them outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications. Internal disputes within the left play out within their comment section, whilst the news section often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal.

> I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK; I don't think there's anything to the left of them outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications. Internal disputes within the left play out within their comment section, whilst the news section often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal. This only reinforces the meta-po…

Agreed on biased perceptions of the guardian.

Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception out there that the Guardian's comment section in particular is pretty left wing particularly on identity politics stuff. Even if the core paper is pretty central - e.g. It broadly supported the Blairites over the Corbynites over past few years.

It would be really interesting to have some visual data on their comments section here compared to other papers e.g. of numbers of articles on say class, race, gender and some kind of ranking of their left wing / right wing strength. And likewise for regular reported core news/articles.

As it stands there might be a lot of bias in people's individual views- including this comment.

Still it is interesting to compare articles. It's a cool site.

Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

#70
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?

I lean left but outside the Dem party I hangout /r/politics and lurk in /r/conservative and also checkout many socialist anarcho{communist|syndicalist|capitalist} and libertarian subs... I know what I feel is "right" and I feel confident I can tell B.S. I mean when the obvious goal is ...basically to make the op/commenter feel better about their "view" of the world then to me it's obviously something to take w/ a ver…

Reddit did a huge purge of conservatives in the past couple years (2020 especially). You will have to go somewhere else if you truly want a conservative viewpoint.
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