Daily Kos should have an opinion section

Why I advocate for Opinion to be in its own section on Daily Kos

 I've posted over 1,400 stories on the liberal website Daily Kos so it caught my attention when the site was referred to in a Washington Post article:

Republicans are increasingly sharing misinformation, research finds - subscription)

You can read a summary of the story without a subscription on RawStory here.

Here's a part, in the last sentence below, that I was interested in:

Measuring misinformation on social media is complicated. With billions of posts per day on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it would be impossible to examine each one for misinformation. Instead, to approximate the level of misinformation shared by political candidates, we relied on NewsGuard, a nonpartisan organization that provides trust ratings for news sources online.

NewsGuard uses several point-based criteria to assess a site’s credibility and transparency, giving each site a score from 0 to 100 based on how well it adheres to those standards. NewsGuard considers those rated at 60 and above, which include such sources as The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN, to be reliable news sites. It considers those rated under 60, which include Breitbart and Daily Kos, to be unreliable.

I was curious about this and found an exchange with Steve Brill from NewsGuard and the Daily Kos founder here.

Comparing Breitbart with Daily Kos is absurd. The former promotes nothing but lies and distortions from the far right including outright conspiracy theories. Kos is a mixed bag as a website because it has two types of articles, those by members of the staff, often reporting straight news, and those by community members. This later group is a mix of stories about news generally with excerpts from other publications and sometimes, but not always, with the opinion of the diarist included. The other group of community diarist stories are those that are mostly original ideas and thoughts and sometimes offering information about subjects like Trump's psychopathology which I have written about.

The assortment of news and opinion on Daily Kos enriches the website, but I think it can be confusing and seem like a hodgepodge.

I propose a change to the way Daily Kos is setup to clearly differentiate pure opinion and original information essays from posts from contributors which share news stories. I'd like to see Kos have an opinion section the way The New York Times and The Washington Post does.  The Times and Post opinion sections include essays by staff columnists and guest contributors. There are also satirical columns some of which make me wonder why I ever try to write satire. Dana Milbank and Alexandra Petri, both Washington Post columnists, often mix in biting satirical pieces with their straight opinion columns.

 (Click images of Aug. 29 websites from the Times and Post below to enlarge to see how their opinion columns appear.)

On Daily Kos original writing with sometime unique perspectives on issues compete for readers with hot topics in the news. Those who post stories just referencing a news story with several excerpts provide a unique and valuable forum for discussion among the readers of Daily Kos many of whom are familiar with each other. Typically an article or column on The NY Times and Washington Post can have between 1000 and 3000 comments. Stories on the same or other subjects on Daily Kos will have between 100 and 300 comments and they will include frequent commenters whose names often are familiar to regular Kos readers. On Kos stories, whether by staff or community members, one comment can have numerous replies. Unlike on websites like the Times and Post, on Kos the author of an article often adds their own comment and replies to other commenters.

The only other high readership progressive website I know of where you can post comments is RawStory (and it's sister site AlterNet)  and frequently they have between 200 and 1000 comments to an article. I find RawStory to be a useful site to follow breaking news on because it is updated frequently, often not long after stories are published or covered elsewhere. For example they will often publish a story about a topic discussed on Morning Joe an hour or so after it is aired.

They have summaries of articles from sites like The Wall Street Journal which I don't have subscription to. Wiki says says it is hyper-partisan and quotes a source saying it is junk news. It may be very progressive but I hardly consider it to be junk news. Because they do this is is more than an aggregate news site like Google News or YaHoo News.

I don't see Daily Kos as being able to do this at least not with the staff they have, nor do I think they should. Kos is unique among website, at least among progressive websites (I don't follow right-wing site) in that it has a large community of diary writers and commenters. It is unabashedly progressive but I don't find a bias when they report on the news.

If someone wants to follow the political news shortly after a story breaks from a progressive perspective, I recommend RawStory. They not only cover stories form the mainstream media, they also cover news items on websites like Vice News, Axios, and Buzzfeed. These three website offer a potpourri of stories some of which are trivial, but sometimes they do investigative reporting and beat out the major media with stories.  Google News and YaHoo News seem to post articles from more of the mainstream media.

I have a friend who follows news on a Facebook feed but don't know how this is done so I can't recommend or not recommend it.

So, back to having a discrete Opinion section on Daily Kos

If only for simplicity I advocate for those who post Community "dairies" (as they are often called) should be able to post them to an opinion section. That way those who want to use Daily Kos as their primary or a secondary news source can easily find those articles, and those interested in pure opinion pieces often with original perspectives and sometimes with attempts are satire and snark can easily find them. I would include diaries about personal experiences (like one about surviving Covid) and the much beloved Pootie diaries which are about Kos pets. This would by no means denigrate such diaries but lets face it they aren't news, but they chronicle way that our pets are vital in so many of our lives. 

Since regular denizens of Daily Kos are often referred to with each other as Kossacks we could have a separate section called Kossacks and Kospets.

It could look something like this  (image below) with the author having the choice as to where their diary would appear. I selected a few example form March 29 which I thought could be considered as presenting an original slant on the subject the author was writing about. Of course the diarist would decide where their story would go.