4 ms·

The news is infinite though. Inconvenient news could be left out, and that would still meet your standard. There is also the matter of the English language hav

by tropo 10y ago

The news is infinite though. Inconvenient news could be left out, and that would still meet your standard. There is also the matter of the English language having numerous ways to express the same thing. Choice of words matters, even if the cold facts don't change. Example: did the cars collide, crash, hit each other, smash into each other, or have an accident? Was the child spanked, swatted, hit, whacked, struck, or paddled?

ouid 10y ago
I said ordered by significance. If something is left out of my ideally objective news outlet, then it was, by construction, less significant than the things that were included. To address your second point, connotation is objectively a part of meaning. I did not merely require that this ideally objective news source SEEM objective. It has to actually be objective. Frankly, the argument you made was that the existence of "farther right wing" media pushed fox towards the center. All I have to do is demonstrate that there exists an objective presentation of newsworthy facts, even if only in an abstract sense, and then show that fox has not changed its position relative to itself, over time, to show that your argument is false. Centered does not mean average, when it comes to reporting, it means objective.
- tropo 10y ago
  It's not the existence of "farther right wing" media that puts fox near the center, though that is suggestive. It's the fact that fox more closely aligns with mainstream opinion. Ah, here, this looks like a story on the study I remember: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outlet-says-about-your-political-ideology-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outl... For your convenience, it links to this: http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/ http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/ http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/ http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...
  - gnicholas 10y ago
    Great links! We were planning on using some of the Pew polling data in our partisanship determinations, since in some ways the question is not "what is left and what is right" — it's "what is outside of your bubble"?
  - ouid 10y ago
    objectivity is very different from mainstream
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  that doesn't make sense, because if your scale is based on subjectivity vs objectivity, there is no partisan divide. There is just objective journalism approaching one side (approaching, as I don't think any journal could be truly objective without being purely numbers-based) and highly subjective content from any viewpoint approaching the other. That defeats the whole point of reading across the aisle and is more a metric of yellow journalism vs fact reporting. To attempt to split subjectivity onto a left and right wing would be to cause a lot of difficulty determining the limits and whether a report is subjective or objective at a partisan level would inherently be poisoned by the reviewer's own bias.
  - ouid 10y ago
    I'm not trying to measure bias, the statement that I am challenging is that fox news has been moved to the left by the addition of other sources which are to the right of Fox news. This is only the case if the definition of unbiased is "average". My reasoning is as follows: Partisan bias is a type of bias. If there exists a way of presenting information without any bias, then it presents information without partisan bias. if such a method exists, then we do not need to measure news sources relative to each other in order to talk about what qualifies as non-partisan. This means that partisanship is a static quality of a piece of journalism, i.e. any method you propose of measuring partisanship should always give you the same answer for the same piece of journalism. If you interpreted fox as having a far right bias in 2004, and don't notice any particular change in their reporting, then you should interpret them as having a far right bias now.
    - beaconstudios 10y ago
      but if fox is far right, where does that leave Breitbart? Most would say that Breitbart is more partisan, but you can't just make it "far far right". A scalar with a limit means that as you add new values towards the limit, other values have to shrink towards the root to compensate. Fox was "far right" in 2004 when politics was generally quite centrist, but now that politics has become much more polarised on both sides, fox is still fairly centrist but new, more partisan sources have come along. Fox's level of partisanship hasn't changed, the environment has, leading Fox's "relative partisanship" to go down.

by tropo 10y ago

ouid 10y ago

I said ordered by significance. If something is left out of my ideally objective news outlet, then it was, by construction, less significant than the things that were included. To address your second point, connotation is objectively a part of meaning. I did not merely require that this ideally objective news source SEEM objective. It has to actually be objective. Frankly, the argument you made was that the existence of "farther right wing" media pushed fox towards the center. All I have to do is demonstrate that there exists an objective presentation of newsworthy facts, even if only in an abstract sense, and then show that fox has not changed its position relative to itself, over time, to show that your argument is false. Centered does not mean average, when it comes to reporting, it means objective.

tropo 10y ago
It's not the existence of "farther right wing" media that puts fox near the center, though that is suggestive. It's the fact that fox more closely aligns with mainstream opinion. Ah, here, this looks like a story on the study I remember: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outlet-says-about-your-political-ideology-2014-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outl... For your convenience, it links to this: http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/ http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/ http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/ http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...
- gnicholas 10y ago
  Great links! We were planning on using some of the Pew polling data in our partisanship determinations, since in some ways the question is not "what is left and what is right" — it's "what is outside of your bubble"?
- ouid 10y ago
  objectivity is very different from mainstream
beaconstudios 10y ago
that doesn't make sense, because if your scale is based on subjectivity vs objectivity, there is no partisan divide. There is just objective journalism approaching one side (approaching, as I don't think any journal could be truly objective without being purely numbers-based) and highly subjective content from any viewpoint approaching the other. That defeats the whole point of reading across the aisle and is more a metric of yellow journalism vs fact reporting. To attempt to split subjectivity onto a left and right wing would be to cause a lot of difficulty determining the limits and whether a report is subjective or objective at a partisan level would inherently be poisoned by the reviewer's own bias.
- ouid 10y ago
  I'm not trying to measure bias, the statement that I am challenging is that fox news has been moved to the left by the addition of other sources which are to the right of Fox news. This is only the case if the definition of unbiased is "average". My reasoning is as follows: Partisan bias is a type of bias. If there exists a way of presenting information without any bias, then it presents information without partisan bias. if such a method exists, then we do not need to measure news sources relative to each other in order to talk about what qualifies as non-partisan. This means that partisanship is a static quality of a piece of journalism, i.e. any method you propose of measuring partisanship should always give you the same answer for the same piece of journalism. If you interpreted fox as having a far right bias in 2004, and don't notice any particular change in their reporting, then you should interpret them as having a far right bias now.
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    but if fox is far right, where does that leave Breitbart? Most would say that Breitbart is more partisan, but you can't just make it "far far right". A scalar with a limit means that as you add new values towards the limit, other values have to shrink towards the root to compensate. Fox was "far right" in 2004 when politics was generally quite centrist, but now that politics has become much more polarised on both sides, fox is still fairly centrist but new, more partisan sources have come along. Fox's level of partisanship hasn't changed, the environment has, leading Fox's "relative partisanship" to go down.