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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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I'd say ProPublica, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all mainstream left-leaning news sources I expect to do a better job of analysis than NPR. With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP which I expect to be relatively trustworthy on the facts (of course with some bias on which facts they report and precisely how they present them), but analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.

I do note that Economist and Atlantic have more authors pushing back against DEI slop, usually couching their counterarguments in some hard numbers before going 'this is not how we help (insert chosen minority)'. Still ostensibly on Team DEI, but less wedded to the distasteful tactics normally employed.

You expect ProPublica to do a good job of analysis? They're the ones that broke my faith in in-depth journalism with this article. I'd recommend reading it yourself to see if you can find their trick.

Spoilers: The tool works perfectly. 25% of "risk 1" and 80% of "Risk 10" offenders go on to reoffend, regardless of race. They then calculated "Of the [Race] criminals, X% of the [non-|re-]offenders were labelled [high|low] risk" to obscure that fact. I went into it more here, on the old site.

They certainly know how to tell a compelling story, but that's all it is: a story.

I used to read The Atlantic fairly regularly, but that was a while back and so I don’t know how they are in recent years. I know they have some quite left and still some not-so-left writers.

I’m quite surprised you list The Economist here, since they are typically considered fairly neoliberal in their stances, and so not leftist friendly. The fairly recent not-pro-trans article they had rocked the world of a lot of /r/neoliberal.

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/v5d0hp/executive_editor_of_the_economist_on_eliminating/

https://old.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/uo2ghw/the_economists_record_on_trans_issues_setting_the/

Like I agree that a lot of NPR analysis is pretty shallow, even if you stripped out any overt political valence, but I guess I don’t quite understand your complaint and/or your particular progressive stances on any given issue.

(For context, I used to be an Obama-loving left neoliberal and now I’m a ~Romney-loving right neoliberal, but I’ve always been annoyed with progressives.)

With the "analysis" part, I'm intentionally excluding Reuters/AP; analysis just isn't what they're trying to do.

Technically, Reuters does have an opinion section, Breakingviews.

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