I think there may be a mis-understanding; what I mean is that in the very essence of reporting a scoop, they have already chosen to report that event above other events. So the reporting about the given scoop may be 100% fair and honest, but there is still, in the bigger picture, a large statistical bias, since only some types of things qualify as 'worthy of reporting' and get converted to scoops to begin with.
e.g. imagine one news outlet that only reports about homicides, another than only reports about theft, and another that only reports about covid deaths. All three can be perfectly factual, but they still present radically different views of what is wrong with the world to their readers.
Yeah, but factual reporting isn't necessarily fair reporting. Professional media also had an agenda, and the same set of facts can be presented in many different ways.
Facts can be simply omitted, emphasized or underplayed, interpreted in both a positive or a negative way. Not to mention facts are only as good as the sources.
Even if you only report facts as they happen bias is injected by what facts are reported and what stories are covered or omitted. The reporter will naturally be drawn to stories that match up with their perspective on the world. It's very difficult for us to actively and constantly challenge our own assumptions and seek out evidence that contradicts them.
I've thought about this a lot. I think that if an outlet is reporting on some statistical fact. Like the frequency of mass shooting deaths for example they should also place that in perspective against car accidents, cancer, heart disease etc. Contrast that with crime and murder trends over a large swath of time etc. This way people can properly contextualize and rank the real risk in the situation and separate it from the sensationalism.
But even if all of that is carried out. There is still bias from what the reporter chose to write a story about.
I think the worst offenders of situations like this are the investigative NPR style stories where a reporter seeks out an individual's story as a means to emotionally manipulate the reader into a particular policy position. It's far better to look at the larger statistical picture. You can find a sob story to emotionally manipulate people towards quite literally any policy position imaginable.
This applies to the real world as well.
I've had a couple of times when I've been closely involved in an event that was covered in the national newspapers. Both times the stories were presented with major factual inaccuracies and with clear bias.
I've brought this up in conversation a few times over the years and quite often a similar experience was reported by others. Yet everyone still seemed happy to trust the accuracy of the other articles being reported.
I think part of the issue is that it is literally impossible to have a news organization that everyone thinks is unbiased. Even if you just report straight facts people will claim bias just on the set of facts that you report. I think this is a lot of the reason there is such a diversity of news sources.
Pretty much all reporting has bias. As they say, they're at least being honest with you. You can't avoid it, because people are inherently biased. They can strive to remove it from the writing, but that doesn't mean they succeed.
That may be most news organizations these days. You may not be able to completely escape some sort of bias. However I think this is usually used as a cop out for news organizations failing uterly at doing their jobs.
There is a big difference between subtle bias when clearly reporting the facts and deliberately pandering to and riling up your customers based on their preconceptions.
There is a big difference between going into a story to find and present facts with as little of your own bias a possible, and going into a story with the direct intent of finding a way to spin it to satisfy your audience in boost sales.
I can confirm this. I was involved in an incident once. The TV news reporters all came out and covered it. That evening, I watched the reports on the same event from 3 channels. They all got the basic facts 100% wrong, and each channel had a different set of those wrong facts.
It wasn't even an issue of bias, or making the story more compelling. It was simply slap-dash, string any-old list of crap together, run it, and move on to the next item.
This perpetuates the misconception that there is a such thing as objective newsworthiness. If I only want to read stories about endangered species and polka musicians, that's no less valid than someone who wants to read about school shootings and the Olympics.
There's no such thing as unbiased news coverage. Any news outlet has more stories to report than they have capacity to report. They must exhibit some bias to control for what they show. (Or, alternatively, I guess they could just randomly select news stories, but I don't think that'd be very compelling.)
Due to the finite amount of journalist time available to any given news outlet, they always commit biased reporting by choosing what to publish and what not to publish (effectively, publication bias). I agree that the contents themselves are not necessarily fully subjective, but I 100% believe that what is in the contents is subjective.
Coverage bias is essentially how consent gets manufactured. Give undue time and portray in a better light one side, spend time disproportionately covering one issue over another, etc.
Are you sure about that? Sometimes news can appear "fair and balanced" if it fits in with one's own bias. Every news organization heatedly claims it is "fair and balanced".
There is a level of this that is reasonable, which is that what is presented in the writing be factual and not sensationalized. I imagine The Dispatch believes they meet this bar (I have no idea, I just heard of them now).
But there is a level of this that is impossible, which is avoiding prioritizing some aspects and not others. Merely choosing what to put in a headline vs first paragraph vs 5th paragraph is making a subjective decision about what is most important.
Even more subjective is choice of words for complex phenomena that defy simple summary. For example, were the activities of last summer protests, or were they riots? Most people have an opinion on which word is a better fit, but there is no way to deny that both have a basis in objective fact. So, writers choose one or the other depending on their own biases and what they want to emphasize.
Finally, there is the "file drawer" source of bias, which is simply not covering some things that you don't think are important. You're not lying or misinforming anyone, but you are making a subjective decision about what people should be thinking about.
I personally think it's best if a publication is open about how it's going to be making these various subjective decisions. And I think it's dishonest for someone to claim their news reporting can be purely objective.
Objective reporting, if it ever existed, is a quaint artifact of history as far as I can tell. Even if explicit opinion or analysis is excluded, the mere selection of which facts to include and exclude is subject to bias of the writer/editors. The only way I can see to get the unbiased facts out of news reporting is to consume a variety of sources.
Complaints about bias in journalism only exist because of an idealist assumption that unbiased "news" or "facts" is something that exists. But it does not. Sure, there are some "objective facts," but they're really more measurements or scientific observations — today's temperature, yesterdays death totals, the price of a stock, the score of a sports game, etc.
Anything beyond the boundaries of this ticker of raw measurements depends on some level of narrative, and therefore bias. Even the driest, most unbiased reporting of "what happened" is not immune to selection bias in choosing which events to report.
Ironically, the more that a news organization pretends this purist ideal of unbiased news exists, the more biased it becomes in its effort to hide its natural biases.
In terms of raw signal/noise, a pair of oppositely polarized news organizations are more informative than a single "unbiased" one. I learn more about the "truth" (which is mostly a matter of perception) by reading both Fox and CNN, and comparing the overlaps and differences between them, than I ever could by reading a single "unbiased" source of news in the middle.
All news is not subjective. If it was, it'd be editorial content, not news reporting (obviously, don't trust any big media outlet that doesn't make a strong distinction between the two within their own organization). Now, because reporting is the product of humans, it's inevitably going to be subjective to some degree- people still decide what to report on, what words to use when describing things, etc. Objectivity in reporting is like something people can asymptotically approach but never attain.
So, there's a huge difference between a news outlet that attempts to be objective, and one that takes off running in the other direction. All news outlets are somewhere on that spectrum, and some of the most popular ones are actively trying to mislead their audience.
If all news was subjective, it wouldn't matter if someone got their news from Alex Jones or The Economist. It's all just someone's subjective opinion after all! But it does matter, it matters a lot. Some media outlets make an effort to be as truthful and transparent as they can be, and some just say whatever comes to mind in hopes that it'll keep people interested for long enough to hear their ad for vitamins for preppers or whatever.
Bias isn't necessarily a bad thing in reporting, in many ways it's good to have an agenda (examples: anti-corruption, pro-world peace, pro liberty, etc.) It's when the agenda overrides the facts or when the agenda is covert rather than overt that things get messy.
e.g. imagine one news outlet that only reports about homicides, another than only reports about theft, and another that only reports about covid deaths. All three can be perfectly factual, but they still present radically different views of what is wrong with the world to their readers.
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