The entirety of journalism these days hinges on biased language to push narratives. There is no neutrality in journalism now, and I don't know enough about its history to say whether there ever was any.
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.
A perfectly neutral and objective journalism hasn't existed, but the aspiration toward neutrality and objectivity have existed and even been mainstream at points in our history. In my lifetime, it's a relatively recent phenomena that media outlets were openly biased, viewing their function as "activism" rather than truth-seeking.
There's no such thing as neutrality. Usually when people talk about neutrality, they really mean status quo, or worse giving equal weight to "both sides" (implying the major US political parties are the only possible views on a subject), without even trying to assertain the truth of the matter.
Journalism isn't simply putting facts down on paper, but it's also interpreting how it affects the reader. Even if you pretend to simply write the who what when and where of a story, you still have to choose what to cover. That in and of itself has no right answer, you inevitably make an idological choice.
I don't understand where this recent obsession about using neutral language in reporting is coming from. Using neutral language doesn't mean unbiased. Very convincing yet very biased pieces can be written in the most neutral language.
> Over the last three decades, news organizations have traded in their neutrality and integrity for political and "narrative" influence.
No, they haven't. News organizations have always had strong political and narrative-driven tendencies, what has changed is that the media is more diverse in bias and thus the illusion of neutrality that came from the period where the major national media spoke with nearly uniform bias and agenda is lost.
There is no such thing as objective journalism. Or rather, objectivity and neutrality are 2 separate concepts, and you can’t avoid engaging in side-choosing and still report on news.
Neutrality is a mirage. Journalism can and should be fair without trying to appear 'balanced' or neutral. For example, there aren't really two sides to climate change when 99% of scientists and experts agree. It's really only the news who tries to position issues as if they are competing arguments like sports teams. This seems like it's had a negative impact over all by giving a false equivalency, for politically motivated reasons, to issues that are by and large not contestable or debatable.
Journalism was rarely feigning objectiveness: during the 1920s through the 1970s, some of the strongest voices in favor of labor were journalists. "Neutrality" is largely a construct, or meme, that has been pushed by Rupert Murdoch since he founded his "news" network. Naturally, his own properties are nowhere near objective, despite some people claiming WSJ magically escapes bias.
Everything is naturally biased, the only distinction is whether an entity is open about their bias. This goes for anything: whether it was the New York Times and FOX hawking for nearly every war during the 2000s, or it was Newsweek favoring MLK Jr. and Life describing his speeches with phrases like "demagogic slander" during the 1960s, everyone's naturally got an opinion. This doesn't stop applying when writing about a subject.
I know that bias cannot be eliminated, but it can be minimized. That is the perogative.
Let's say you run a newspaper that has to report on 50 different stories every day. A large fraction of these stories involve the moral plights of two or more aggrieved parties. Any moral stance you take inevitably skews the perception of the story, when the reader has the responsibility for forming an opinion without it being tilted by anything other than the facts. Sticking to the facts of the story is paramount. Taking a moral stance is a shortcut- an easy way to excite your crowd and get them addicted to more high-adrenaline reporting.
>Equating two sides when they are starkly different is not neutral and reporting the facts.
Sticking to the facts is not the same as equating the two sides. Neutrality in reporting is connoted with sticking to the facts.
>If you truly believe this is the case, please get outside of whatever bubble you are living in and see how other people think.
The practices I am recommending are (part of) an antidote to the failure modes of how people think. Yellow journalism is on an uptick because of social media- the most emotional news stories are the most viral ones. There's a reason that they teach best practices for media objectivity in grade school. To hopefully constrain our emotions enough to make good judgements and decisions about the events we read about.
People that make fun of NYTimes's neutrality seem to prefer a world where the Huffington Post, a slew of shared facebook news reports, and the Drudge Report dominate the news outlets. Is this the world you want?
Let's go back into the story to discuss:
>The two sides no longer seem to recognize each other’s concerns.
The GGP highlighted this quote as being ridiculously neutral. I imagine you would call this "equating the two sides". When I read it in the context of violent protest, I took it to mean that they are not communicating through any other means than violence, i.e. there are not currently productive talks between the two sides.
Journalists and their editors are human. They are just as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone, and it's generally the problem with most journalism. Instead of following the facts and the story where it leads, I think there's an internal bias that dictates where a story should go. Whether it's the reporter doing the bias pushing, or their editors, truly independent, fact-based journalism is becoming a myth.
"Neutral" reporting is a fantasy. None of us are capable of fully breaking away from our viewpoints, and editorial boards are made up of people who are biased.
How do you even define neutral in a way that does not simply justify a specific set of biases?
Something as simple as which news items you choose betrays huge biases: Do you write about the US government shutdown, or about the thousands of people dying of preventable diseases every day.
Word choices: Do you call something a coup, or a revolution? Do you call someone terrorists, or freedom fighters?
In many cases, there are many seemingly "neutral" choices, and many word choices that are technically correct, and what will seem "neutral" to you will be hopelessly politically slanted to others.
I'd much rather have media organizations of a variety of viewpoints that are honest about where they stand than someone that pretend to be objectively neutral.
I wonder if this is true in reality. Isn’t it possible and maybe even likely that a non-neutral party is providing the most accurate version of the story? For example, a person or reporter living in a war zone, experiencing the actual war is likely biased in some fashion, but their recollections of what is actually happening is quite accurate compared to a “neutral” journalist sitting in their comfortable office in New York City, referring to various anonymous sources and reports from multiple perspectives.
Also, filtering out the positive and negative language might hide the bias of the article, making it seem more authoritative and believable. Many times when I read an article, and I see the journalist making conclusions with bombastic and unbalanced language, it is helpful information toward allowing me to detect bullshit and avoid that source.
There never was such a thing as neutral, factual reporting.
Case in point: The Economist. Certainly one of the historically and currently most respected publications.
The Econsomist never claimed not to be biased. In fact they proudly produce opinion journalism.
The point, however, is that their reporting is fair and considers the other side of the argument and that the're absolutely open about where they stand.
Foreign Policy is another good example coming to mind.
News is produced by humans and humans have biases and always will have.
What's new is massive lying on an industrial scale and the fact that facts seem very relative nowadays, depending on the news medium.
I don't feel you should completely dismiss neutrality and empathy - we need more openness from our news, not less. Journalists IMO should strive for neutrality and distance (knowing they will never attain it), particularly distance from the culture, nation and media which they were born to. They should question the narratives (often delivered pre-made), and use of words they are given in a press release, not relay it, and they should make clear their own biases to readers, at the same time as striving to see the situation from various points of view, not only their own, or the one they were brought up with. They should strive for this this because it brings empathy and understanding, in a way that completely ignoring neutrality and picking a side in often polarised conflicts does not. It is impossible not to have sympathies, but journalists should also try to put their sympathies to one side at least until they have a good picture of the facts on the ground and can form an opinion.
In the example you give, we have lots of terms for the participants in asymmetric warfare, all employed to taint debate before it starts:
IMO the acronym or name chosen by the fighters/armies themselves would be best in each case, rather than a label dreamed up by the military which opposes them - it also stops lazy reporting which groups disparate groups together as one enemy.
I'd rather news didn't have a pre-decided viewpoint/agenda which they try to cut the facts to fit, which is often what partial news or 'op-ed' turns out to be when written by professional columnists. We should not have a liberal view or a right-wing view, we should have journalists who approach each story with an open spirit and actually do the journalism required to come up with an informed opinion and transmit that. That hard work should come before they have an opinion on any story.
Unbiased reporting has never existed in the history of the US press, and likely never will. The very decision to publish or not publish story inserts a little bias. The press can't possibly cover everything, so they have to decide what should be printed, and it's not always a straightforward decision.
40 years ago, there were several nationally recognized publications (NYT, WaPo, WSJ, etc.), and all of them had a bias. NYT editorial leaned left, WSJ editorial leaned right, and everyone knew this. The political leaning was baked into brand of the publication.
This all changed in the internet era. The collapse of print advertising decimated the industry. Publications became more incentivized to publish questionable reporting because clickbaity headlines brought more ad traffic. The Trump campaign was covered ad nauseum because having his name in a headline significantly increased traffic to an article, and thus revenue.
The online advertising model is fundamentally incompatible with the kind of journalism you're looking for, but we as a society are hooked on it because it means we don't have to pay for the content.
We all have bias and there is no point in denying it. But that shouldn't stop people in professions like journalism aiming for independence and neutrality. People can be honest and intellectually honest, follow the evidence and logic impartially, in spite of their biases. The problem comes where they see their role as something different; then they become propagandists and political partisans who hide behind their supposed impartiality.
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