5 ms·
> 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" i
by 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 agoWell, Murdoch is a jerk. Arguing that Google is no more a jerk than Murdoch is faint praise.
- Qub3d 9y agoFirst, 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 agoFirst, 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.
- mirimir 9y ago> 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 was this line that got to me: > s/chilling/humdrum/ Bias is pervasive. Has been forever. Maybe always will be. But I still refuse to consider it "humdrum". Perhaps I just have no sense of humor ;)