As someone who lives in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania that Stu Faigen calls home, I say that half of the county, which is about 325,000 people, should agree but will disagree because of how strident his politics generally are in favor of politicians and causes from one side of the aisle.
I say "his politics" but I mean his and those of the other contributors and staff of the Bucks County Beacon. It is a who's who of radical-left Bucks County politics.
You can't look at the decline in journalism in our country without looking at how one-sided the coverage provided by the journalists has been for the last 40 or 50 years.
If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.
Who knows how that would have affected the secular decline to this point?
> If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.
Or they'd have no paying subscriber base because everyone is pissed off at them.
I prefer sources that just report on local happenings (including the activities of our local government) and am fortunate to have at least one that is non-partisan, but I don't think their success is assured, especially in an area that leans far in one specific direction.
In this case, the area in question very much does not lean in one specific direction. Which makes it unclear what journalists that do lean far in one direction are trying to accomplish in such an area.
They are pandering to the portion of the population that does lean in a specific direction and wants to participate in an echo chamber, which seems like it should be a tiny number of people to me but organizations like Fox News (and all the knockoffs that sprung up to reach people who feel like Fox News is too "fair and balanced") continue to prove me wrong.
Given what I said above, my point was that a significant portion of the local population will remember the negative articles about their side from that outlet and avoid it, leaving them with the depressingly small number of people who either don't consider themselves to be aligned with either party or actually want to read unbiased reporting.
In addition to just writing about what they believe personally, the business case is that you can capture more subscribers pandering to one side than you can pandering to no one.
One of the greatest failings of journalism over the last bunch of decades has been that it takes too much of a neutral (or capital-oriented) position. You can follow this from the scores of puff pieces on the Vietnam War being, like, totally under control, dude, straight through to the modern endless refrain of "well, Steve says the Earth is round and Bob says the Earth is flat, but it's up to you to decide :)". Incuriosity and hypercredulity of access-journalists saving up trivia for their book deals, all with the "noble" goal of appearing "neutral" - it's been the death spiral of Western democracy.
How else would you suggest communicating to a population that fundamentally does not share your views, other than with neutrality?
As a Bucks County native, the Beacon is not at all representative of the median voter. Oh, certainly there are some aligned with it, but there are just as many with the opposite views, and most are in between. Journalists that don't respect those people in the middle, that disagreement, have no chance of being listened to by them. They have every right to voice their opinions, but if journalists only respect the people who already agree with them, then we're all just going to stay in our bubbles.
The person you are responding to doesn't acknowledge that the Democratic Party represents the left wing in US politics, presumably because they aren't beholden to the small far left portion of its constituents.
I wouldn't spend time trying to justify your stance to him, which is a very reasonable one IMO.
This breaks down when one half of a two party system goes all-in on lying.
Reality has a left wing bias because reality is fact-based.
To take a "neutral" political position in this environment is to accept blatant lies. Journalism should be a pursuit of truthful information, thus being "neutral' politically is untenable if you want to do actual journalism.
It's true that might not always be the best for your subscriber numbers. But some folks do, actually, care about the truth.
I don't think the OP is saying he has an issue with the reporting of facts. I think what he's getting at is that a lot of what passes for news today (especially online) are really just op-eds.
Presenting just the facts is being politically neutral, but only when it's just the facts. Providing commentary on the facts is not. I don't think it's all that crazy to say there's been an obvious left-leaning bias in that regard for the last 10-20 years.
Congratulations, you've bought into the fascists' framing.
Whenever the media doesn't present the fascists' narrative unchallenged, it's declared that they're being biased. Doesn't matter what the facts are, the accusations still come.
I just got a pair of AirPods Pro 3 and have been looking for a way to use for Live Translation of a language other than Spanish.
I don't feel like I 100% needed to hear the English translation, because the animation tells the story almost without words. But it was a bit more interesting to have my AirPods tell me bits of the words exchanged between the adults and the boy, leading into and out of the video.
I started using LLMs to refactor and maintain utility scripts that feed data into one of my database driven websites. I don't see a downside to this sort of use of something like Claude Code or Cursor.
This is not full blown vibe coding of a web application to be sure.
If Apple released an M-Series AppleTV 4K with sufficient RAM, it would be an AppleTV with Apple Intelligence. It could also be designated as an Apple Home Preferred Home Hub.
The groundwork would then be laid for HomePods and HomePod minis to receive voice queries and respond with Apple Intelligence-powered answers.
My family and I moved to a house with 3/4 acre of land in late 2020. I knew I needed a chainsaw, so I bought a Makita 36V 16-inch saw with four 18V lithium ion batteries.
When I am not using the chainsaw, those batteries power 9 or 10 other tools that are necessary around my house and perform very well. The charger I got with the chainsaw package charges two 18V batteries as fast as they can be safely charged.
Around this same time, I bought a Honda gasoline-powered mower. The reason I went with a gasoline-powered mower and lithium ion power tools for other purposes was running time.
At the time, the gasoline powered mower was the only one available that would run for the time I need to cut the entire lawn.
Now, most of the lithium ion-powered tool brands have 40V/80V systems that are more powerful than their 18V/36V product line. If I needed to replace the Honda gas-powered mower, I'd probably consider an 80V lithium ion mower.
But most of the tools I already own couldn't use the 40V batteries, so I'd want to consider buying at least one other tool that powerful in order to capture greater value in the new battery and charger investment.
>Around this same time, I bought a Honda gasoline-powered mower.
Get a robot, it trashes pretty much any other mowing equipment if the terrain allows it. Extremely low maintenance (time), virtually no noise whatsover. You also get perfectly even lawn at all times.
Based on personal experience having: a gas mower, gas a brushcutter, a battery strimmer, and the robot. Since the property is not that large, you would not need a riding mower or a zero-turnaround.
I think a lot of tech companies are getting lost in a situation where Venture Capitalists ideally want to invest in companies that will eventually fit in the large capitalization growth stock category. But many tech companies will never fit that model.
Squarespace is an example of a company that was never going to fit that model, for a host of reasons.
Furthermore, if a company is highly unlikely or never going to become a large cap growth stock, providing extra working capital, acquiring ancillary services, funding additional advertising and marketing, will not change those prospects. Only revolutionary increases in functionality will.
I say "his politics" but I mean his and those of the other contributors and staff of the Bucks County Beacon. It is a who's who of radical-left Bucks County politics.
You can't look at the decline in journalism in our country without looking at how one-sided the coverage provided by the journalists has been for the last 40 or 50 years.
If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.
Who knows how that would have affected the secular decline to this point?