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Comment by Chris2048 | Hacker News Reader

Chris2048

I'd like to point out something - I admit Breitbart is biased, but a little balance is needed here;

My google news suggestions are full of liberal news articles, not just WaPo, but random blog-like articles from sites I've never heard of, buzzfeed clones that could have been created just the previous week.

I wonder why, because my you-tube suggestions are mostly Milo, Ben Shapiro etcetc - no suggestion I'm a Jezebel reader, yet I keep getting HuffPo articles put before my; Why is this? Are there just more of these sites on the internet, or is it a bias in google news?

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I up-voted you because I didn't think you deserved to be down-voted and because I believe that there is a problem with including blog articles in news results because I think it waters down the word as few blogs do original reporting. Rather they just add spin.

(I also don't think there is "liberal news" or conservative news. Rather there are different interpretations of facts. And because those generate so many arguments I think an interesting browser plugin would be one where readers could engage in a Lincoln-Douglas debate about questions raised by news.)

what's the difference between a blog and news?

For me the distinction is that news organizations do original reporting while blogs usually do not.

Journalism is a discipline of verifying your sources. A news agency would be expected to do this but a blog may not.

"different interpretations of the facts" may be true sometimes but not in this specific example. Denying climate change makes as much sense, factually, as claiming the world is flat. As xkcd would have it, "Science. It works, bitches."

Sadly, it's possible I was down-voted for revealing that I like watching Milo / Shapiro vids, and dislike buzzfeed / HuffPo; In this case, I wasn't critical of them, just made the case that they are not to my tastes, given I that ask google not to show me similar sites.

It would be nice if there were merely 'different' interpretations of the news, but I find that the biases fall on certain topics or talking points too often to not notice. The most infuriating aspect of this is the assumptions - the things that are assumed but not discussed.

Incidentally, I'd include 'opinion' pieces in mainstream news outlets as similar to blogs - they also shouldn't be freely mixed in.

I'm also not a fan of opinion pieces but I do like analysis (I really enjoy the Economist because they seem to do a better job providing context and analyzing the consequences of news events than most news sources.)

I tend fall more on the liberal side (I like to call myself a liberal libertarian) and I am also not a fan of Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post. I don't consider them news organizations though. However I do consider Fox News a news organization and think they can do better. I expect a conservative slant but sometimes their home page resembles a supermarket tabloid too much for my tastes.

For me I have given up on American news media pretty much entirely and use BBC News 30x more than CNN.

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