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.
So my take away from this is not that readers are biased or that news is biased, but that we can't give up our own responsibility in identifying the truth. I am aware that news outlets are biased, but knowing that does not mean I can't read articles in those sources and learn from them. It's incumbent on me to put something I read into a larger context, to make educated guesses as to an article's correctness, and to think critically about what is being stated. Otherwise, I will make choices far more prone to some personal bias.
I agree that all news is biased. But fake scandals and other non-news is more present in some feeds than others. And once you realize that there is always bias you can at least to some extent attempt to correct for that. Mandatory reading in this context is 'Manufacturing consent'.
But even given all that negative sentiment a solid free press is a good thing and should be protected.
Right. Even deciding what to write about is a form of bias. I've found it's best to read news from outlets where you clearly understand the bias at play. Then you can calibrate your brain to what you're reading.
Sorry, but this sort of absolutist thinking is just naive. Nobody ever won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for "just reporting the facts, full stop". Good journalism requires context which is messy and, indeed, political.
That said, propaganda isn't good journalism – it doesn't provide context so much as manufacture it. That isn't to suggest that propaganda is necessarily obvious. Bias lies on a spectrum, with facts-only reporting on one end and propaganda on the other. But just because grey areas exist doesn't prevent us from identifying the black.
It would be illegal, for example, for a publication to knowingly engage in defamation. As a society, we recognize that a publication's right to freedom of expression does not outweigh the harm dealt to an individual subjected to baseless harassment. Similarly, if a "news" organization is so divorced from the facts as to make its audience more ignorant of the actual happenings, then we as a society should recognize the harm caused by that organization and sanction them appropriately.
I think we've realized there is no such thing as a mostly neutral, reputable news source. What you choose to report on, what you choose to ignore, and what language you use to frame that information are editorial choices and they cannot be totally free from bias.
had this debate with a family member, when I was pointing out the 'bias' in a particular newspaper - his contention that if the story was true, it couldn't be considered biased - he couldn't quite grasp that choosing (or not choosing) which stories to publish, and how often to report on something is defacto bias.
It is naive to think any news outlet shouldn't be regarded with any amount of suspicion. Bias exists everywhere, if you select a news source and blindly trust it you're going to be misled some day.
I'm not jumping on the same opinion as the guy you've replied to, but completely ignoring the consideration that news publishers don't run certain compelling stories because they're not allowed to due to political bias of the publisher is extraordinarily naive.
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.
That's not necessarily what I am implying. I'm challenging the idea that, if all news is biased(beyond simply picking and choosing stories), one can reliably find the truth by essentially making a Venn diagram between biased sources and analyzing overlaps. I neither believe nor disbelieve that it's a pathway to truth. I have my skepticism because it provides no form of validation; if all sources are too highly skewed, any overlap becomes highly suspect and simultaneously difficult to test.
News is reported by humans and humans have bias, nobody doubts that. A responsible consumer of the news should know that, and take it into account, but it's not in and of itself an excuse for throwing out the fact-finding that journalists do.
One of the publications I trust the most (WSJ) is one that is editorially least aligned with my own biases. It doesn't make me doubt their factual reporting.
I think that depends on your sources. TheIntercept doesn't fit into that bracket to me. Bias? Maybe, but bias isn't a problem if you read a diverse set of sources. Bias isn't a problem, opinion isn't a problem; reading one source and complaining its 'fake news' because it's bias isn't the same as yours is.
First, no I'm not trying to make two wrongs into a right. Pretending that this is a new thing is a faulty assumption. And if you want to fix something, starting with faulty assumptions is the wrong way to go about it. The political forces negatively affecting journalism are not new forces, and any attempt to fix the problem needs to understand that.
Second, where did I condone biased news? Where did I say it was okay? I explicitly specified that I was talking outside the moral dimension on this in my first comment.
It's rather annoying that someone who is linking me to fallacy websites is themselves putting words into my mouth, creating a strawman to attack instead of dealing with what I'm actually saying.
It doesn't demonstrate bias in this article, it demonstrates that they completely lack journalistic integrity and their content shouldn't be trusted. Sorry if the example wasn't particularly pertinent to the content of this article, it was the one that came to mind on the spot.
Sure, news sources can be biased and we should be discerning when we look at them, but that doesn't automatically mean that the source is automatically wrong 100% of the time.
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