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Comment by mafribe | Hacker News Reader

   manually fact-checked by professional
   journalists from BuzzFeed.

The article seems to accept -- uncritically -- "professional journalists from BuzzFeed" as arbiters of fake news. Not a good start.

That said, and anecdotally, style is often a fair heuristic for political agenda. It should be possible to improve the methodology of such research so it is insightful without such arbiters.

As an aside, it is not surprising that "that the style of left-wing and right-wing news have a lot more in common than any of the two have with the mainstream", for they often use the same, or similar tools to undermine society, a goal both have in common. They read the same literature about how do this, typically following a Lenisist approach.

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Buzzfeed News is actually a very respectable investigative journalism team led by a Pulitzer-winning journalist. It's funded by their clickbait site.

Is the Pulitzer prize evidence of reliability?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Cooke

Evidence? No, but a good indication.

It is worth noting that BuzzFeed's (considerable) clickbait revenues are being used to fund serious journalism (and that their investigative team is one of the few in the industry that has been expanding instead of downsizing): https://www.poynter.org/2016/how-buzzfeed-built-an-investiga...

I think it's less style and more rhetoric. There are key phrases (ironically, "fake news" is one of them) that I think might be usable to both indicate how partisan something is, and potentially in what direction.

I'm not quite sure what your style/rhetoric distinction refers to. I conjecture that the underlying mechanism why we can often easily predict political content from style is that most writers in general, and journalists in particular, don't write their texts from scratch, but mostly copy existing material and adapt it a bit. You can think of it along the lines of replication of DNA. The economics of modern journalism have made the copying worse.

As an aside, I once developed software for an old telecoms protocol, and found a large number descriptions of this protocol in the trade press. They were all terrible, but felt quite similar. Eventually I managed to track down the origin: teaching material for a course developed by Cisco. As far as I can tell, not one article in the trade press was original. Yet, clearly some authors did quite a bit of work to disguise their copying, including -- bizarrely -- to redraw (badly) the figures in the original material.

The distinction I see would be this: Style is how you lay out the article and make the argument. Rhetoric is more about the content of the article itself - what phrases you use, what slogans, terms, etc; how you frame certain issues.

Most publications, fringe or not, have journalistic style that would, in my opinion, make them hard to distinguish. That is, if you took a Brietbart article and a Vox article on two different issues and compared the format/length/general tone and language, they wouldn't be all that different.

However, I think these outlets do vary in the specific rhetoric they use, the people they rely on for comment/as sources, etc. I would therefore focus on specific terms or language rather than general style.

1. If anybody would recognize what manufactured clickbait looks like, it would be Buzzfeed.

2. Buzzfeed, and a number of other traditionally disreputable sites, have really stepped up their journalism game over the last year or so. If all you know about them is listicles, you might be surprised at some of the stuff they turn out nowadays.

Your (1) is a very good point ... as the saying goes "It takes one to know one!". But I find "were manually fact-checked by professional journalists..." a bit of an unfortunate way of describing BF's expertise.

I would not be familiar with (2) as I gave up on BF a long time ago.

They put their names on the work:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an...

Which of the journalists there do you think is just the worst? I mean, they work for Buzzfeed right?

Given that the goal of "partisan" news-style is emotional manipulation, it is fairly easy to spot; and I think that even if authors try to adjust style to avoid pre-screen filters, they'll lose some of that ability to manipulate.

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