> And at the same time, people have gotten worse at valuing objectivity, with a bias toward news sources that reinforce their existing views.
Are you sure you have the causation in the right direction? It seems to me that the news sources have gotten less objective, thanks to takeovers by PE and wealthy individuals. I'm not interested in news sources with an explicit right-wing position, which is what the major papers in my area offer, so I don't subscribe to them.
> That seems like a strange perspective. Isn't the whole point of a news source not to be editorially biased? They give you the facts, and you use those facts to draw your own conclusion(s).
er...what? what news source do you feel does this?
> it's hard to pull people away from their news sources to something unbiased. We need to take unbiased articles to the people.
> I am not interested in unbiased news sources.
So, which is it? I think the focus on bias vs unbiased news sources is a distraction. ALL news is biased. That is something that will never change.
> If others cannot understand our opinion
What if the issue here is that others understand your opinion perfectly, but still disagree with it? This whole conversation is starting to sound a lot like you want a tool that will magically make people agree with you.
You've lost credibility completely with this sentence. While I'd agree that many news outlets have their biases, some hugely so, saying everything they say is a lie is just categorically wrong.
Many news outlets like Reuters and the PA have business models based around factual reporting for others.
> 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.
Same. A few years ago, I worked at a large tech company that a certain well-known news organization likes to cover. After a few articles were published relating to work I was involved in, I found myself thinking "Nope, that's totally wrong" or "Technically correct but presented in a biased way". I decided to cancel my news subscription with them because I realized that they have a certain narrative they want to present to the public, and why should I trust any of their reporting on other topics if the one I was involved in firsthand was just completely wrong?
>The only reason for this was they read one news source and I read another.
There's your problem. If you were both unbiased, I would assume that you both went back to your news sources and found out which one was misleading. Then whoever was relying on the unreliable news source, changed their news source. They shared that info with other people, and that unreliable new source is now out of business.
Since it's a pretty safe bet that such a thing did not happen, it should be obvious that you're the problem. Personally I could not fathom accepting any news organization's account of any topic as unbiased and complete. For most of those stories, I don't care, they don't affect my opinions. But for things that do matter, I deliberately seek out opposing opinions and see if they can make a convincing argument.
> but it takes on a different character for those on the right.
Could you expand on what you mean by this? Because in my experience, the right has no monopoly on disregarding out of hand anything written by the other side...
Nonetheless, I agree with you that biased news is not bad perse. In fact, in a healthy democracy, one would expect news to be biased - after all, the media are among the most important channels of national discussion. The problems come when bias exceeds fairness and truthfulness.
I think a lot of people are willing to pay for mostly-unbiased business news. WSJ, FT, Economist, Nikkei et al seem to be doing alright.
But that leaves a lot of the world unreported by serious news organizations. I’d love to see a better answer to that than “support flawed organizations that do some good reporting.” But so far I don’t.
> every periodical does. I’m not sure what the point of complaining about that is.
That is broadly correct, though not all of them are equally biased. However, journalistic objectivity [1] is something we could demand them to strive for. I'm not sure if the press have always been like this.
> Likewise, it’s not particularly noteworthy that WSJ and Fox News have a conservative bias.
Most of the US mainstream outlets are biased in a particular direction. I've said the before here, but you can see that by taking any reasonable list of major outlets [1], and checking their biases [2][3].
> If we are to get up in arms about something, it should be because they are being deceptive (or worse, publishing false information), not because they are merely biased.
Paltering is also a form of deception, and you could argue that it is quite pervasive and pernicious. I think Mother Jones, and many other outlets, are guilty of that.
>There are people who make their livelihood evaluating journalistic sources. I'd personally suggest seeking out factual news sources over editorialized news and straight opinion articles masquerading as news. Even those will have their biases on what to publish, but those biases will often be far more evident (if not overtly spelled out).
Bias isn't exactly truthiness. You can be fantasticly unbiased and still be wrong.
I have done what you recommend as well, quite useful for the last half decade.
> I sense that they are intentionally covering the situation in non-inflammatory way.
We want more of this though right?
I sense that many people can't understand the difference between opinions or editorials and news.
I sense that many people actually enjoy the inflammatory way news is sometimes covered unless it's different from the way they'd like to see it.
I sense that people can't understand how a single new outlet can have varying opinions and points of view on a single issue and will choose a single one out of many to make their point.
Imagine how different things would be if people were intelligent consumers of news.
I don't think you can have a news industry dependent on clicks and profits and have no sensationalism. I also don't think you can have a completely unbiased media when people, based on their consumption, don't seem to want it. It's unrealistic given the different biases and motivations that people have.
> 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.
Strong disagree. You're saying that the more someone tries to be unbiased, the more they end being biased? This seems like an excuse to embrace bias and push a narrative. I've never agreed with that regarding news.
> But news today isn’t what news was in the 1980s and 1990s.
Other than the fact that its not anymore from a mostly-uniform set of corporate owners with mostly-uniform biases imposed on it, yes, actually, it is (and that had actually started to break down in the 1990s, anyway.)
(There are qualitative differences by specific outlet and medium, sure, but that was true in the 1980s and 1990s, too, with studies then showing, IIRC, quantity of radio and TV news consumption – unlike newspapers and newsmagazine consumption – inversely correlated with knowledge of current events.)
> media, who have recently abandoned even the pretence of honestly reporting on, rather than trying to steer, political winds?
This has been going on for a long time. The media has been doing this as long as there has been media. There's probably just a pretty good chance that your personal preferences were fairly well reflected in the Northeast centric, government institution trusting, upper middle class value holding, media establishment.
IMO, as someone whose views were rarely reflected there and rarely saw questions asked that I'd like asked, I feel we're much better off. News organizations are being more clear about their biases (intentionally or not) and there is a much better variety of news.
> Was the mainstream media ever objective or impartial?
With respect to the mainstream media, there was always some bias in terms of what was reported. What we are seeing today is something entirely different and very dangerous.
The original article pointed to a couple of the problems with the media today, things like there being disagreement over what the facts are and how balanced reporting has a tendency to misrepresent the facts. I would go a step further by suggesting that facts and context have been abandoned altogether.
The end result is that two media outlets can tell two very different stories about the same issue. Ignoring facts is how we end up with protests being described as riots, or being described as protests with undue emphasis upon violence (which is a clear case of balance misrepresenting the facts). At the opposite end of the spectrum, I have seen individual claims left unquestioned in the name of moral clarity. The sad part is that reporters could take a step back, look at what is happening at a societal level, and have damning evidence that backs their moral clarity with facts.
If you believe that this is nothing new, I would suggest pulling up a full newspaper from thirty years ago. You would find that news reporting is clearly separated from other content. You would also find that moral clarity is in there, but it would be clearly presented in forms such as the editorial or human interest story. Lines were drawn instead of blurred.
> Ultimately the problem is that it isn't that we have illegitimate news flooding the market of information it's that we are finally starting to realize almost all of our information was biased to one degree or another and we are slow to adjust the way we consume information.
Why not both...?
> isn't that we have illegitimate news flooding the market of information
This is absolutely a problem. Old media seems to be pretty content with narrative framing for the most part, this new brand of illegitimate media just makes shit up. They have no intent to engage in the public discourse, their only purpose is to reinforce alternate realities and to shift the Overton window.
Are you sure you have the causation in the right direction? It seems to me that the news sources have gotten less objective, thanks to takeovers by PE and wealthy individuals. I'm not interested in news sources with an explicit right-wing position, which is what the major papers in my area offer, so I don't subscribe to them.
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