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Comment by slovette | Hacker News Reader

No... come on, I think it’s obvious what they should have said:

“billionaire investor Peter Thiel.”

The man has an identity outside just being a “Trump backer”. Using that descriptor specifically chooses a minor, politically motivated detail about someone and concludes to the rightful reaction of turning away.

Choosing to write a “news” article while also choosing descriptors like that make this an opinion piece, not a news article. I think it’s what is fundamentally wrong with most of the Information passed around today; you can’t escape the opinions buried neatly inside EVERY article, desperately persuading you to think and feel a certain way. Everything’s hostile these days, just constantly attacking your mindset.

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> minor, politically motivated detail

Describing it as this is also editorial. You just want them to follow your editorial line instead of their own.

My understanding is that the parent comment isn't trying to pose as a 'news article' and therefore is not implicitly accepting to adhere to vanishing standards of integrity and delivery of the information.

A HN user / comment can be as biased and editorialized as they like, the same shouldn't be true for ' traditional media outlets ' whatever that means.

As far as I'm concerned, it is objectively true that this is a minor, politically motivated detail although it is still relevant information. They could have mentioned that somewhere in the article without appending it as a prefix / title to his name. That's rather disingenuous. It's not his main defining characteristic.

That being said, I believe one should not necessarily turn away from what they perceive to be propaganda of one kind or another, but rather view it as such and analyse it, although this can be irritating at times.

FWIW, Thiel has also backed 48+ other political candidates over the years, maybe we should add all of that to his name ? ;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Support_for_politi...

Exactly.

Barring the fact that I don't expect to get journalistic integrity from a source such as "opendemocracy.net", I wanted to still highlight the irresponsibility in describing an individual like Thiel in such a specific way.

I see how you could form this point, but I also strongly disagree.

A quick Google on Thiel reveals he's 53 years old and has led a life FULL of detail that dwarfs his political choices in the last 4 years. One could write very thick books on this individuals life (and it looks like they already have in some context).

Using the descriptor of 'Trump Backer' is deliberately prioritizing one single personal choice the subject individual made in a time representing roughly <7% of his total existence.

I don't think it's editorial to say it's politically motivated at all. If you simply remove the specific subject matter of the descriptor used and instead, rely on its representation of the overall individual, its statistical irrelevance to the whole easily identifies its gross misuse as title descriptor of that individual.

I would go as far to say, that not only is it not editorial to arrive to such a conclusion, I think it hard-pressed to not describe it as a factual occurrence.

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