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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> The Opinion Pages of the WSJ also tend to lean more conservative, while the news side leans liberal.

As with most News Corp outlets, the news side of the WSJ leans pretty far to the right (it did so even before it was a News Corp outlet, though not as much), it only seems “liberal” by comparison with its own opinion section.

That said, unlike, say, Fox News, the WSJ news side at least makes an effort to adhere to traditional journalistic norms, its right wing bias is more evident in agenda-setting (story selection, devotion of space, and placement/promotion), and less in commentary and outright fabrications in “news” content.

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If you think that's "pretty far to the right," I'd wager you haven't met many people on the right or spent much time reading their thought. There's a whole world of interesting political variety on the left, the right, and elsewhere that will never appear in the newspaper.

Most US media leans left, which is why WSJ news side even looks to be conservative compared to their peers.

For example: https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Do_97_percent_of_journali... Somewhere between 87-94% of political donations from journalists goes to Democrats. Wikipedia links some more polls that show similar things (though not as stark): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...

When you have a profession that leans one way, most reporting likely follows. So while WSJ news seems conservative, it's positions compared to the general public's views leans slightly left. (Though after reading WSJ for many years now, it highly depends on the reporter).

An interesting site if you are concerned about media bias- https://www.allsides.com/media-bias

An excellent example of the Overton Window.

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

Very good point...you would think tech folks would be better at identifying relative vs absolute frames of reference, but then the problem space is heavily propagandized and there is only so much time in the day.

What would an absolute frame of reference with regard to political opinion look like? I'm having a hard time conceiving such a thing, since not only does the range of opinion shift over time, but issues move into and out of relevance unpredictably.

It ain't easy!!

It would be something like "select * from [reality]", except there are various problems like physically manifest reality is not the entirety of it, and our records of reality are often technically from the fantasy realm and the truth has been lost to time without our knowledge.

In the case of allsides.com, they're only comparing ~mainstream US media outlets against each other, but there are many cultures that would consider even left leaning US culture to be insanely far right.

In a more serious world, competent philosophers/linguists/historians/anthropologists/etc would deconstruct and expose these organizations for what they really are: propaganda outlets.

That applies both ways - there's no shortage of religious-rightist cultures on the planet that'd treat many sections of the U.S. right as quite left-leaning.

Even comparing to Europe, the memes that the US is to the right or left of Europe is just grossly wrong, often driven by taking one pet issue like public healthcare and using it as the base, when it's just one aspect of policy and there are others where Europe is markedly more moderate or conservative compared to the US.

Oftentimes those sorts of bias-rating sites also report clearly left-leaning outlets as more centrist than they are, and I wouldn't be surprised if outlets like the NYT get far higher ratings for factuality than they deserve.

Almost all humans live in a virtual reality, and cannot realize it because of the mutual effort to hide from that fact across the ages. Such is life.

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