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Comment by JohnWhigham | Hacker News Reader

Yup, this article is pretty hilarious and is just another example of how mainstream media continues to stick their noses up at any consideration of alternative viewpoints. PBS has largely followed the herd and has become yet another liberal lifestyle outlet that caters only to their liberal audience. How about we fix that first before talking about something else?

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^Low-quality comment.

PBS is consistently rated as a reliable and unbiased source of information. You think it's a "liberal lifestyle outlet", but what evidence do you have to support this claim? What is your unbiased alternative?

Maybe you should watch this series ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4aNmdL3Hr0&list=PL8dPuuaLjX...

> PBS is consistently rated as a reliable and unbiased source of information.

Not quite -- PBS is rated reliable but biased left: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

Studies that looked at bias in the media found PBS to be the most centrist of the major news organizations. People on the extremes of the political spectrum see PBS as biased against them, as they would any centrist organization.

Centrism is also an ideology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_centrism

Actually, PBS skews left in the adfontes study, which is the most detailed one I know: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

Wow, this chart perfectly illustrates my original point. There is a great gaping hole in the upper right of that graph - there is no high-quality, right-skewed news, even though this is where I would assume just over half of the bulk of Americans would actually place their political beliefs. There's nothing of significance in between the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, after which there is a steep cliff towards Breitbart and all of the horrors that come after it.

Many possibilities for why this is apparently the case though. Could be a miss-match in who people identity/affiliate themselves with and where they actually land. Lot of talk of the "window" having moved in the passed decade. Possible middle-left bias ate up a bunch of those who would have been middle-right? A lot of moderate right pundits have landed at left biased orgs over the past years. Would be interesting to see what this chart would have looked like 15-20 years ago.

It could be that media corporations are in cities, which have become strongly leftist in the last few decades. The rural areas simply haven't had the density of human organization to create a reliable corporate media.

Another theory is that reliable corporate media is stocked with university graduates, and universities have also gone left.

> Would be interesting to see what this chart would have looked like 15-20 years ago.

Indeed, I think most of these were centrist news organizations 15 years ago!

What I find strange is that the only media outlets that actually cover local rural topics in detail is my local NPR station.

Often they're lumped together as "yet another liberal" with PBS .... but they're more and more often the only ones covering those ares / giving voice to folks out there media wise.

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