8 ms·

s/chilling/humdrum/ Go to google, get google's view on things. Go to facebook, get facebook's view on things. Go to X, get X's view on things. Powerful compani

by vacri 9y ago

s/chilling/humdrum/ Go to google, get google's view on things. Go to facebook, get facebook's view on things. Go to X, get X's view on things. Powerful companies using their influence on the media is business-as-usual. Regardless of the moral position in this incident, journalism has always been under such pressures - it's not being 'chilled'.

mirimir 9y ago
Not at all. Or at least, there has long been an expectation that owners won't bias news reporting. They can legitimately express their views through editorials, of course. The Wall Street Journal remains an excellent example of this.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Media bias has existed since the early days of the printing press. Scroll to the history section at this link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias The whole article is worth reading.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Thanks. I get that's there's always been bias. But there have also long been principals of press freedom and unbiased reporting. What I was objecting to is the normalization of censorship and biased reporting.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      While there are some fine examples of journalism with integrity, I don't see any evidence of that being the norm or traditionally the norm. For every Pulitzer Prize winner, there are thousands of articles about Bat Boy and $politician being a baby eating demon. A good example would be the New York press. Most of their papers, of which there were many, were owned/operated by political parties - according to the documentary series called, simply, New York. I suspect your vision of these principles is subjected to some sort of bias? I'm not sure what it is called. It might be survivorship bias, or maybe confirmation bias? I don't want to speculate, as that's not my domain. However, I don't actually think those principles have ever really existed - as a general rule. Again, there are examples of such, but it doesn't appear to be the norm. If you get bored, go down to your local library and have them dig you out some old microfiche. This is nothing new. Censorship and biased reporting have been a known problem and already is the norm. To be clear, I agree it is a problem. It's a horrible problem. However, it's not new and it's aleady normalized. That's why I constantly speak out to support the freedom of expression. That's why I recently, in HN, spoke out to support the Nazis right to express themselves and why I decried Google taking away their domain name. I don't like Nazis. I like free speech. Nazis are pretty deplorable, after all. As for censorship, it comes in various forms. Soft censorship is most common, in the Western world. I can relate a time when it happened to me, if you want. I was a freelance journalist back in my university days.
      - amoorthy 9y ago
        Good point regarding pervasive bias in journalism, intentional or not. I've been thinking about how to help people identify bias and poor quality citations and built a chrome plug-in to do so. This is Beta but would appreciate any feedback you all have. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejjicefdjlblgnojolgbideklkp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejji...
        KGIII 9y ago
        I am tablet-bound, at the moment. I'll check it out, probably over the weekend. I've emailed myself a link. I will check to see if I can contact you through the site - though I will be using it in Opera. It does make me question this, however. How are you certain you're not introducing your own biases with it? Or, perhaps not even biases of your own? Sometimes bias exists simply by virtue of externalities. An example might be that, when differentiated by economic ability, black people don't actually do more drugs than white people - though crime stats would indicate otherwise. The difference is their neighborhoods are policed more heavily and the biases in enforcement. Notably, even black officers may be biased in their enforcement. It really seems like a tough nut to crack. I'm a mathematician, not a social scientist. I don't actually have any idea how to fix this.
        amoorthy 9y ago
        Thank you very much for offering to take a look. Btw, you can email feedback directly to me at amoorthy at civikowl dot com. I'll also check this thread regularly if that's easier for you. (Oh, and only works on Chrome for now; sorry) We may introduce some bias through our algorithm, insofar as the weights we assign various factors favor one type of article over another. But we haven't used a training set yet (which is where ingrained biases would be factored in) so the algorithm is fairly simple for now. I agree with you this isn't an easy problem to crack. We wanted to see if (a) there's interest in a solution and (b) reservations about our approach before investing more. So this is exactly the kind of feedback that's helpful. Thank you again.
- vacri 9y ago
  > there has long been an expectation that owners won't bias news reporting Have you heard of a man called Rupert Murdoch? "Owners don't bias news reporting" is an ideal, not an expectation. Pointing out an ideal case isn't appropriate for describing the common case. Biased news in newspapers have been with us for as long as there have been newspapers. Pretending it's something new, and that influence from outside the paper is something new, is just naive (perhaps 'wilfully ignorant') to the extreme.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Well, Murdoch is a jerk. Arguing that Google is no more a jerk than Murdoch is faint praise.
  - Qub3d 9y ago
    First, you're trying to make two wrongs into a right[0]. Second, why isn't this an expectation. Obviously we can't make news orgs be completely unbiased, but we can push for more transparency. Heck, even breaking up monopolies would allow for more owners with more nuanced points of view getting prime time in each smaller organization. For comparison, consider what Clearchannel Media did to US radio stations. (basically it turned everything into a homogeneous top-25 repeat station) [0]: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/twowrong.html http://www.fallacyfiles.org/twowrong.html
    - vacri 9y ago
      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.
x0x0 9y ago
It's not about biasing news. It's about using their market share in two businesses (search/news and ads) to force their way into social networking. ie the threat that if Forbes didn't play ball with Google+, search placement (ie traffic) and hence ad revenue would dry up.

by vacri 9y ago

mirimir 9y ago

Not at all. Or at least, there has long been an expectation that owners won't bias news reporting. They can legitimately express their views through editorials, of course. The Wall Street Journal remains an excellent example of this.

KGIII 9y ago
Media bias has existed since the early days of the printing press. Scroll to the history section at this link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias The whole article is worth reading.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Thanks. I get that's there's always been bias. But there have also long been principals of press freedom and unbiased reporting. What I was objecting to is the normalization of censorship and biased reporting.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    While there are some fine examples of journalism with integrity, I don't see any evidence of that being the norm or traditionally the norm. For every Pulitzer Prize winner, there are thousands of articles about Bat Boy and $politician being a baby eating demon. A good example would be the New York press. Most of their papers, of which there were many, were owned/operated by political parties - according to the documentary series called, simply, New York. I suspect your vision of these principles is subjected to some sort of bias? I'm not sure what it is called. It might be survivorship bias, or maybe confirmation bias? I don't want to speculate, as that's not my domain. However, I don't actually think those principles have ever really existed - as a general rule. Again, there are examples of such, but it doesn't appear to be the norm. If you get bored, go down to your local library and have them dig you out some old microfiche. This is nothing new. Censorship and biased reporting have been a known problem and already is the norm. To be clear, I agree it is a problem. It's a horrible problem. However, it's not new and it's aleady normalized. That's why I constantly speak out to support the freedom of expression. That's why I recently, in HN, spoke out to support the Nazis right to express themselves and why I decried Google taking away their domain name. I don't like Nazis. I like free speech. Nazis are pretty deplorable, after all. As for censorship, it comes in various forms. Soft censorship is most common, in the Western world. I can relate a time when it happened to me, if you want. I was a freelance journalist back in my university days.
    - amoorthy 9y ago
      Good point regarding pervasive bias in journalism, intentional or not. I've been thinking about how to help people identify bias and poor quality citations and built a chrome plug-in to do so. This is Beta but would appreciate any feedback you all have. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejjicefdjlblgnojolgbideklkp?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/civikowl/clbbiejji...
      - KGIII 9y ago
        I am tablet-bound, at the moment. I'll check it out, probably over the weekend. I've emailed myself a link. I will check to see if I can contact you through the site - though I will be using it in Opera. It does make me question this, however. How are you certain you're not introducing your own biases with it? Or, perhaps not even biases of your own? Sometimes bias exists simply by virtue of externalities. An example might be that, when differentiated by economic ability, black people don't actually do more drugs than white people - though crime stats would indicate otherwise. The difference is their neighborhoods are policed more heavily and the biases in enforcement. Notably, even black officers may be biased in their enforcement. It really seems like a tough nut to crack. I'm a mathematician, not a social scientist. I don't actually have any idea how to fix this.
        amoorthy 9y ago
        Thank you very much for offering to take a look. Btw, you can email feedback directly to me at amoorthy at civikowl dot com. I'll also check this thread regularly if that's easier for you. (Oh, and only works on Chrome for now; sorry) We may introduce some bias through our algorithm, insofar as the weights we assign various factors favor one type of article over another. But we haven't used a training set yet (which is where ingrained biases would be factored in) so the algorithm is fairly simple for now. I agree with you this isn't an easy problem to crack. We wanted to see if (a) there's interest in a solution and (b) reservations about our approach before investing more. So this is exactly the kind of feedback that's helpful. Thank you again.
vacri 9y ago
> there has long been an expectation that owners won't bias news reporting Have you heard of a man called Rupert Murdoch? "Owners don't bias news reporting" is an ideal, not an expectation. Pointing out an ideal case isn't appropriate for describing the common case. Biased news in newspapers have been with us for as long as there have been newspapers. Pretending it's something new, and that influence from outside the paper is something new, is just naive (perhaps 'wilfully ignorant') to the extreme.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Well, Murdoch is a jerk. Arguing that Google is no more a jerk than Murdoch is faint praise.
- Qub3d 9y ago
  First, you're trying to make two wrongs into a right[0]. Second, why isn't this an expectation. Obviously we can't make news orgs be completely unbiased, but we can push for more transparency. Heck, even breaking up monopolies would allow for more owners with more nuanced points of view getting prime time in each smaller organization. For comparison, consider what Clearchannel Media did to US radio stations. (basically it turned everything into a homogeneous top-25 repeat station) [0]: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/twowrong.html http://www.fallacyfiles.org/twowrong.html
  - vacri 9y ago
    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.

x0x0 9y ago

It's not about biasing news. It's about using their market share in two businesses (search/news and ads) to force their way into social networking. ie the threat that if Forbes didn't play ball with Google+, search placement (ie traffic) and hence ad revenue would dry up.