4 ms·

Reason.com

by ikeboy 9y ago

Reason.com

tyingq 9y ago
Thanks...spent 5 minutes on a very brief flyover, but it looks promising. Lightweight site too, didn't notice excessive JavaScript or ads. I really am interested in better sources. Maybe I'm naive, but there seems like there's a reasonable, if not really lucrative, opportunity for someone to produce actual unbiased news in the US. It's worth a few dollars a month to me.
- fleitz 9y ago
  It's hard to produce unbiased news, news is what's noteworthy, that implies at least curation if not explicit 'bias'. Hence whenever an article gets published, a group of people say 'they should have published something else'
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Maybe I'm naive, but there seems like there's a reasonable, if not really lucrative, opportunity for someone to produce actual unbiased news in the US. Unbiased news is an impossibility. Centrist bias relative to the current position of the Overton Window is possible, but probably not economically optimal since political views aren't normally, or even unimodally, distributed.
  - indubitable 9y ago
    There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost. To give an exaggerated example: ---- - Air strikes in the US killed 15 targets in Mideastland. Representatives for the US armed forces stated the targets were high priority leaders of Al Boom Boom. Domestic news in Mideastland claims that the strike was on a hospital. There has been no definitive identification of the victims yet. - The never ending war machine of the US continues to ravage Mideastland as a brutal attack on a hospital where many women and children were being treated has been destroyed with mass casualties reported. Here's a sad picture of a baby by some rubble that's not related to this incident. - An elite fleet of aerial forces unleashed a precision surgical strike in Mideastland decapitating important parts of the leadership of the extremist terrorist organization Al Boom Boom. Locals were reportedly seen celebrating and toppling a statue of the fascist organization while waving US flags and singing the US national anthem. ---- There will, of course, be an unavoidable bias in what is covered since not it's literally impossible to cover everything. But in how things are covered, removing bias is not difficult and it's also testable. If an average reader can, with reasonable accuracy, state the biases and inclinings of the author of a news piece then it is biased. The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing. Here [1] are a list of online newspaper archives. Most are free and some go all the way back to the 1800s. Compare then and now, and the difference is quite extreme. I expect we're going through a time today that people will look back on with some degree of bewilderment, not dissimilar to how we might think of things like the two red scares we've gone through. We, collectively, seem to lose our ability to think coherently and impartially quite easily, but at least historically it tends to right itself quickly enough. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...
    - shaki-dora 9y ago
      There is no "extreme bias" in today's top publications. To use something terribly close to your example: > Dozens of Russians Are Believed Killed in U.S.-Backed Syria Attack https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/world/europe/russia-syria-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/world/europe/russia-syria... First paragraph: Four Russian nationals, and perhaps dozens more, were killed in fighting between pro-government forces in eastern Syria and members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, according to Russian and Syrian officials. The article makes absolutely no judgement on the strike itself. It stresses the limits of information currently available, and quotes dozens of sources from all sides. It then goes on to show, with lots of evidence, that such irregular Russian soldiers actually are in Syria. While people will probably latch onto this part as somehow being biased against Russia, it would be journalistic malpractice not to mention, for example, Crimea, where the exact same dynamic played out. I. e. denials of irregular troops being involved quickly being proven to be lies with Russia's official annexation of Crimea.
      - vidarh 9y ago
        There is still bias in the form of choice of news to report. You may agree or disagree with that bias, and certainly some do a better job than others in reducing it, but it simply is not possible to avoid it, not least because many things are not objective. E.g. "pro-government forces" is factual, but many supporters of the "members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State", which is also factual, will consider it pro-Assad bias to use such neutral language about both sides, and vice versa, exactly because it leaves out the background. And there is not single, objective unbiased solution to that, even if you ignore that their very selection of what to report on also inevitably will be biased. Personally I prefer openly biased sources, because then I don't have to deal with reporters pretending to be neutral while including or omitting information on the basis of biases anyway.
        shaki-dora 9y ago
        Yes, of course, if "it is factual, but people will call such neutral language biased" then there's mo argument here, and we can all go home and it doesn't matter if we have journalists or just read a random number generator's output. But I was making an argument within the context of the parent, which was giving some absurdly biased "examples" and passing them of as something typical for today's top publication. And that's just not true.
hidenotslide 9y ago
That is clearly a libertarian news site. They may be negative towards both US parties but it's still a right-leaning site, at least in an economic sense of right and left.
- ikeboy 9y ago
  The question is whether they're biased towards one side. I think they're much less biased than mainstream media on both sides.
  - hidenotslide 9y ago
    I'm not saying they are being untruthful. But they are very clearly biased to the right on economic issues, and significantly more than traditional news. All the articles I saw on regulation and taxes were negative. I probably even agree with them on many things, but they are _not_ unbiased.
    - ikeboy 9y ago
      Biased towards an economic position is not the same as being biased towards a political party.

Reason.com

by ikeboy 9y ago

Reason.com

Thanks...spent 5 minutes on a very brief flyover, but it looks promising. Lightweight site too, didn't notice excessive JavaScript or ads. I really am interested in better sources. Maybe I'm naive, but there seems like there's a reasonable, if not really lucrative, opportunity for someone to produce actual unbiased news in the US. It's worth a few dollars a month to me.

fleitz 9y ago
It's hard to produce unbiased news, news is what's noteworthy, that implies at least curation if not explicit 'bias'. Hence whenever an article gets published, a group of people say 'they should have published something else'
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Maybe I'm naive, but there seems like there's a reasonable, if not really lucrative, opportunity for someone to produce actual unbiased news in the US. Unbiased news is an impossibility. Centrist bias relative to the current position of the Overton Window is possible, but probably not economically optimal since political views aren't normally, or even unimodally, distributed.
- indubitable 9y ago
  There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost. To give an exaggerated example: ---- - Air strikes in the US killed 15 targets in Mideastland. Representatives for the US armed forces stated the targets were high priority leaders of Al Boom Boom. Domestic news in Mideastland claims that the strike was on a hospital. There has been no definitive identification of the victims yet. - The never ending war machine of the US continues to ravage Mideastland as a brutal attack on a hospital where many women and children were being treated has been destroyed with mass casualties reported. Here's a sad picture of a baby by some rubble that's not related to this incident. - An elite fleet of aerial forces unleashed a precision surgical strike in Mideastland decapitating important parts of the leadership of the extremist terrorist organization Al Boom Boom. Locals were reportedly seen celebrating and toppling a statue of the fascist organization while waving US flags and singing the US national anthem. ---- There will, of course, be an unavoidable bias in what is covered since not it's literally impossible to cover everything. But in how things are covered, removing bias is not difficult and it's also testable. If an average reader can, with reasonable accuracy, state the biases and inclinings of the author of a news piece then it is biased. The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing. Here [1] are a list of online newspaper archives. Most are free and some go all the way back to the 1800s. Compare then and now, and the difference is quite extreme. I expect we're going through a time today that people will look back on with some degree of bewilderment, not dissimilar to how we might think of things like the two red scares we've gone through. We, collectively, seem to lose our ability to think coherently and impartially quite easily, but at least historically it tends to right itself quickly enough. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newspaper_archives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...
  - shaki-dora 9y ago
    There is no "extreme bias" in today's top publications. To use something terribly close to your example: > Dozens of Russians Are Believed Killed in U.S.-Backed Syria Attack https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/world/europe/russia-syria-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/world/europe/russia-syria... First paragraph: Four Russian nationals, and perhaps dozens more, were killed in fighting between pro-government forces in eastern Syria and members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, according to Russian and Syrian officials. The article makes absolutely no judgement on the strike itself. It stresses the limits of information currently available, and quotes dozens of sources from all sides. It then goes on to show, with lots of evidence, that such irregular Russian soldiers actually are in Syria. While people will probably latch onto this part as somehow being biased against Russia, it would be journalistic malpractice not to mention, for example, Crimea, where the exact same dynamic played out. I. e. denials of irregular troops being involved quickly being proven to be lies with Russia's official annexation of Crimea.
    - vidarh 9y ago
      There is still bias in the form of choice of news to report. You may agree or disagree with that bias, and certainly some do a better job than others in reducing it, but it simply is not possible to avoid it, not least because many things are not objective. E.g. "pro-government forces" is factual, but many supporters of the "members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State", which is also factual, will consider it pro-Assad bias to use such neutral language about both sides, and vice versa, exactly because it leaves out the background. And there is not single, objective unbiased solution to that, even if you ignore that their very selection of what to report on also inevitably will be biased. Personally I prefer openly biased sources, because then I don't have to deal with reporters pretending to be neutral while including or omitting information on the basis of biases anyway.
      - shaki-dora 9y ago
        Yes, of course, if "it is factual, but people will call such neutral language biased" then there's mo argument here, and we can all go home and it doesn't matter if we have journalists or just read a random number generator's output. But I was making an argument within the context of the parent, which was giving some absurdly biased "examples" and passing them of as something typical for today's top publication. And that's just not true.

hidenotslide 9y ago

That is clearly a libertarian news site. They may be negative towards both US parties but it's still a right-leaning site, at least in an economic sense of right and left.

ikeboy 9y ago
The question is whether they're biased towards one side. I think they're much less biased than mainstream media on both sides.
- hidenotslide 9y ago
  I'm not saying they are being untruthful. But they are very clearly biased to the right on economic issues, and significantly more than traditional news. All the articles I saw on regulation and taxes were negative. I probably even agree with them on many things, but they are _not_ unbiased.
  - ikeboy 9y ago
    Biased towards an economic position is not the same as being biased towards a political party.