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Comment by Bayart | Hacker News Reader

I've been a regular Monde diplo reader for years, even if I'm a consubtantial right-winger (and it's well known for being very left-wing), for the only reason that it's the best written paper in France.

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This is genuinely suprising to me. How can you find le diplo the best written paper in France and consider yourself right-winger? I thought anyone right of Mélenchon would not bear reading more than 2 lines of it.

Similar to how I, a committed communist, think The Economist is the best paper written in English. When a paper has a very explicit point of view that they don't hide, it's very easy to "read between the lines" and evaluate what they're saying on their own merits, taking their bias into consideration. The news is still the news, and you can make sense of what they're saying about it if you know their inherent biases. This is why I prefer sources like The Economist, who are happy to tell you they're classically liberal, rather than somewhere like CNN that's "unbiased news" that's really very biased without consciously revealing this bias.

>The news is still the news

Since it's impossible to cover everything that happens in the universe, choosing which news is important is a big part of being partial.

Anyway, I am less surprised that a revolutionary comrade like you is interested in knowing how the establishment thinks (to fight it I guess) than by OP's attitude, i.e., a reactionary taking interest (and judging positively) what the revolutionaries are writing. In my experience, people self-labelling as right-leaning tend to dismiss anything coming from the left as "utopian bullshit".

Labeling 'Le Monde," the most trusted newspaper in France and one of the largest papers on the planet as one written by "revolutionaries" is rich. There's far more difference between my politics and Le Monde than Le Monde and The Economist, both of which are still fundamentally liberal, reformist papers that accept the rule of capital and that capitalism is the Only System, just disagree on slight reforms around the edges. OP isn't that strange since Le Monde and him probably agree on most larger political decisions and just disagree about the reforms around the edges unless they're like a monarchist or something.

bayart (and most people ITT) are talking about le monde diplomatique, not le monde

You can admire and appreciate something someone without agreeing. I often read the Times (of London) and Charlie Hebdo even though I disagree quite profoundly on some issue with both editorial lines. That’s fine.

We need to be in contact with other opinions. As long as these opinions are based on our actual reality, not an alternate imaginary universe.

Oh I agree. I read tinfoil hat conspiracies, right wing media, religious stuff, ... but I wouldn't call any of these the 'best written paper'. I should have made it clearer that the rating as 'best' was the surprising part.

Personally my limit is alternative facts. I have very little patience for conspiracy theories.

It is definitely hard to remain calm in front of alternative facts. However, I believe it is a very serious issue and I would like to somehow do something against it, someday. I don't know how though; but in the meantime, I keep up to date with the latest alternative narratives Big Algorithm is willing to feed me.

I was thinking the other day, now I understand better how effective Goebbels could have been and how propaganda shaped European politics about 100 years ago (I was listening to whatshisface the Russian ambassador to the UN, but got the same feeling listening to Sergei Lavrov). In that sense, some exposure to this sort of things is helpful. But the tricks are very obvious once you have some training spotting them.

I'm not so intellectually fragile that I need everything I read to fit my worldview. Note that I'm referring chiefly to its literary qualities (which in my mind trumps editorial lines). There are publications out there that line up better with my ideological bend, but they're "written with the feet" as we say.

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