People keep repeating it almost as if there's no way to improve. I think that if we instead of classifying news as real/fake or neutral/biased, we should classify it as honest/misleading. If a story gives a different impression to reality, it's misleading. That can be easily identified sometimes, especially in articles based on numerical data. Has a stock price "plummeted" or fallen by 2 percentage points?
This criterion would only apply to the presentation of the information within a story, not the choice of stories or even the choice of information sources, since there could be too much to choose from. There, traditional honest unavoidable bias would still exist. But without this blatant dishonesty that commonly occurs, people wouldn't be quite so misled.
Just because one side might be more willing to mislead doesn't mean that their stance on a topic is more likely to be the incorrect one.
Showing which news sources employ the most underhanded rhetorical devices may be a positive goal in itself, but it doesn't, by itself, help the audience make their own determination on an issue. Even more of an issue is that a viewer's determination of which source is more willing to mislead or omit relevant details is much more likely to be influenced by prior opinion than by the content of either source.
Basically, the problem isn't, in itself, biased news sourced, its that the format is fundamentally ill-suited towards giving individuals enough information to come to a reasonably well-supported position on just about any topic of moderate complexity. Further take any topic that appears to be of simple complexity and scratch the surface a bit and there's a decent chance it will turn out to be not so simple.
It's really not that obvious as pretty much every news outlet feels the need to make their point. Biased news is fake news because it sensationalizes issues to be bigger than they appear.
I think that it has become impossible to release 'news' simply as facts without coloration. Even if you look at a simple thing like a one vehicle accident there are usually several variations of it as re-told by the various witnesses, getting to the bottom of the objective truth is a real exercise in human psychology. We all have this, even the best trained reporter.
There is a science fiction book which tells about 'professional witnesses', people that are trained to observe and report only what they observe.
One example given is a house, and the 'simple' person responds the house is white, but the professional witness reports the side of the house they can see is white.
It's a subtle difference, but it shows the world of assumptions underlying our observations, we all do this to some extent. By interrogating multiple sources and selecting what they agree on you can get to some basis of truth, and you can select items that are likely to be bias.
Maybe there is a need for a news 'meta service' that scans the 'regular news' for reports and does as good a job of removing the bias as possible.
This would be interesting, because I think it would make the news extremely boring, plenty of the 'bias' is what gets people excited about the news, facts are 'dry' and not very interesting.
It is very easy to print things that are true but still have a bias. For example, printing things that are true but good about one political party, while printing things that are true but bad about another, is a bias. Almost every news medium has some kind of bias this way, and I think it affects their impact more than if they simply tell lies or not.
(Counter to the current worry, it seems to me that outright lies in mainstream publications are actually somewhat rare. When they happen they are generally corrected. Though there is a recent trend of rushing to publication to appease an overly emotive audience, getting things wrong, and then having to correct days later, after everyone's already been influenced. NYT especially.)
This used to be somewhat addressed in the US television segment by taking it even a step further, and requiring news shows to not only be truthful, but represent both sides of controversial issues. It was called the Fairness Doctrine [1], but it was revoked in 1985.
Ideally, news is objective factual reporting, but editorial bias, conflicts of interest, emotional manipulation, propaganda, selective leaking, anonymous sources, government pressure, basic human nature and numerous other factors prevent this ideal from ever being realized.
As it currently stands, people decide which news sources biases more closely match their own in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. This reinforces their biases, and makes them seek more of the same continuing a downward spiral. Hopefully, you seek sources that disagree with your current opinions in order to balance your perspective, but the vast majority of people don't have the time or energy to do so.
I don't think anyone can afford to be naive anymore. Even traditional journalism, by and large, was a sham--the "impartial" news media is still biased for the most part, they're just better at hiding it under a veneer of professionalism.
I find the idea that there can be an unbiased news source deeply problematic. All reporting of an event has to be from a perspective, and has to make decisions about what to report, what to leave out; what to emphasise, what to play down. An honest news source should be one that is one that is honest about its own biases.
There is still a bias in which things are considered news worthy and how often they are reported. In principle an objective newspaper can correct for that.
I think a lot of problems would become non-problems if people would admit they read the news primarily for entertainment. This expectation that "the news must supply me with reliable facts" is an intellectually-dishonest complaint from an unreliable narrator. It's nobody's job to tell you what to think, and even if it were, it's not also their job to tell you what's important to think about. An objective press is definitionally impossible as long as "the news" can't include a story about every time a tree falls in the forest. Selection bias is unavoidable, and any expectation of a publisher to avoid it is one borne from intellectual dishonesty, because you can only shift the bias, not remove it.
The most objective way to read the news is to read all of it. Unfortunately that's not usually possible. So the next best thing you can do (short of ignoring it) is to read the most divergent sources, and fill in the blanks yourself. I've seen this referred to as "triangulating the truth" - is there a story on Fox but not CNN? That editorial selection bias is itself additional information that you can use to infer the motives of the publishers, and over time, based on observed bias, the motives of the subjects in the article. And then you can think from there about why they have those motives and what their agenda might be.
...but that's all a lot of work, which is why I'm also an advocate for deliberately ignoring the news for weeks at a time. Don't fall for the "informed citizen" trap - that's how they keep you hooked to the propaganda.
I agree. I kind of regret putting the "minimally biased" in my reply. I think that media can be trustworthy despite a small amount of bias, as long as the audience does a little critical thinking. At high levels of bias, they start trying to mislead you.
Edit: because good journalism involves taking steps to avoid bias.
It's not a hard question, it's an easy one - We can't fix it. If you want accurate news you have to think, you have to be willing to know a site's history, who pays for it, what their usual bias is, how they compare with scientific research papers and compare with other news sources to see who's reporting. You have to do that foot work, if you can't do it, you'll never get accurate news. Once you know a few news sources that are generally trustworthy this gets a lot easier of course, with some exceptions. You only really have to do this once per source to get a basic feeling.
We can't just go out and do that for people either without introducing similar biases. It has to be done by every individual who wants an accurate depiction of the truth. Call it idealistic, but anything less is unacceptable in one way or another, so it's the way it has to be.
At best we could build vetting tools into social networks or perhaps better as browser extensions to allow you to filter and see general details about sources, it might be difficult to not introduce issues into these sorts of tools though.
Voting systems and public commenting offer a decent alternative in many ways, but often produce one set of biases that dominate completely. They're no replacement for proper research.
To be honest, I think it’s usually obvious when a ‘news’ source is deliberately telling falsehoods to a less than well-informed audience in order to further a political and / or ideological agenda.
The issue seems the belief that attempting to run an objectively true and reasonably balanced news service is itself ideologically biased, in that it interferes with the desire to conduct ‘the politics of narrow interests’ - something that often requires one group to discount the interests of the others using dishonest speech.
I'd rather a known and well-established bias than the algorithmic illusion of no bias. If I know the bias of my news provider, I can read them critically fairly easily. If I have to guess at the bias, that's much more difficult.
I think a more useful approach would be to aggregate stories from different sources together and summarize the agreed and contested information and viewpoints. That would be a useful tool for evaluating news and identifying propaganda narratives.
You can listen to what people say and the unbiased news is the meta-news that the person said that thing. For example you might see news like "Sam Altman told a panel of senators Tuesday that his greatest fear as his company develops artificial intelligence capabilities is that it causes major harmful disruption for people" then even if what he says is the most insincere biased deception, it's still probably true that he said it, and you can take that meta level as the news.
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.
None, all news outlets are biased to some degree, because we humans are biased, and even if these news outlets are not biased (impossible), they will be reporting news from biased people, and if the news AND the people they reporting them are not biased (impossible^2), no one will watch these news because the audience is biased and would love to hear something affirming their bias (confirmation bias)
So simply don’t listen to the news as an ultimate truth by any means, listen to this side, the other side, and a third side, and if interested in that topic do your research about it just like a research you would do when you buy your next home server, if you don’t have the time or the energy for that, don’t listen to the news, your life will continue going without it.
This criterion would only apply to the presentation of the information within a story, not the choice of stories or even the choice of information sources, since there could be too much to choose from. There, traditional honest unavoidable bias would still exist. But without this blatant dishonesty that commonly occurs, people wouldn't be quite so misled.
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