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I use /r/neutralnews for this purpose. I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. It seems

I use /r/neutralnews for this purpose. I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. It seems like an unfilled niche.

dagw 9y ago
I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. Sounds like you're looking for Reuters.
- kerkeslager 9y ago
  There are a ton of professional news outlets with expressed commitment to political neutrality. Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral.
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    Disagree. I think people want to be able to believe that their news sources are neutral. But I don't think they actually want their news sources to be neutral. That's the genius of what news has become: entertainment that justifies itself by allowing you to feel like you are doing your duty as a citizen by keeping up with current events.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      I think we agree that news sources aren't neutral simply because they express a commitment to neutrality. I think that we also agree that people believe news sources are neutral when those news sources aren't neutral. However, I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "wanting your news sources to be neutral" and "wanting to be able to believe that your news sources are neutral". It's both pedantic and not borne out by any evidence. You're assuming motivations which simply aren't apparent.
      - toasterlovin 9y ago
        What I'm getting at is this: people don't want to base their positions on objective facts. They want to base their positions on how they feel. In order to facilitate this, it is useful to have a news source that claims to be objective, but is actually slanted toward confirming the righteousness of the positions you hold. Thus, people want to believe that their favorite news source is objective (so they can justify their position with righteous conviction), but they don't actually want it to be objective (so they can avoid the terrifying work of modifying their worldview). Something apropos: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090
        kerkeslager 9y ago
        I get what you're saying, and I'm saying that what you're saying is both pedantic and not borne out by evidence. The paper you linked concludes that reasoning (when done correctly) works as intended regardless of the motives for reasoning. Given that reasoning (when done correctly) works regardless of the motives for reasoning, when people incorrectly reason that a news source is neutral, it indicates that reasoning was not done correctly, and that their motivations for reasoning aren't a constructive explanation for why they didn't reason correctly (i.e. your point is pedantic). Further, the article you linked doesn't go so far as to disagree with my point--it doesn't make the mistake you're making, which is to assume that people can't want more than one thing. People can want to base their news source to be neutral AND people can want to feel good (i.e. not feel cognitive dissonance). Even if you were to somehow prove your not-evident point, it doesn't give you a basis to disagree with what I said, unless you can prove that people want to feel good to the exclusion of all other things they want from their news source. The article doesn't say that (i.e. your point is not borne out by evidence, even the evidence that you presented).
        toasterlovin 9y ago
        I think we're arguing past each other and I think that is my fault. In evolutionary psychology, there is a distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. So, the proximate cause for pursuing sex is that orgasms are intensely pleasurable. But the ultimate cause is that pursuing sex leads to better reproductive outcomes, so we evolved the ability to orgasm and, thus, a motivation to pursue sex. I think you are arguing in terms of proximate causes. Somebody desires a neutral news source so that they feel like they are accurately informed about what is going on in the world. I don't disagree with this. Most people genuinely want a neutral news source. But the weird thing is that they do not actually consume a neutral news source, even though it is trivially easy to figure out that your news source isn't neutral. All you have to do is read the other side's preferred news source. To explain this seeming paradox, I am arguing in terms of ultimate causes. I think that this failure to reason accurately about the neutrality of news sources comes about, ultimately, because news consumption is not only about informing yourself, but also to a large extent about reaffirming the righteousness of your in-group. And I think that the appearance of neutrality is critical to enabling this self-deception to occur (because a person is much more convincing when they actually believe the position they're arguing for). Thus my insistence on what you referred as pedantic: people don't actually want to consume a neutral news source, they want to believe that they consume a neutral news source. And not 'want' in the proximate sense that they know that they are deceiving themselves, but 'want' as a shorthand way to describe the ultimate cause for the prevalence of this self-deception.
kzrdude 9y ago
The BBC kind of does that commitment, doesn't it? As do many other public service channels, like NPR. See also http://ethics.npr.org/ http://ethics.npr.org/ Of course it can be discussed what the political leanings of the outcomes actually are.
- Kalium 9y ago
  I listen to KQED on a regular basis. It's a lot of things, but politically neutral can't be reasonably claimed to be among them. Not unless you think sitting square between 70s-type radicals and mainstream centerism is a form of neutrality. I generally agree with their politics, but I find the constant slant somewhat annoying. To put it another way: it's very possible to interpret fairness and impartiality in creative ways. And some NPR member stations make a habit of this.
  - CompelTechnic 9y ago
    The biggest issue I have with NPR is selection bias. They spend a large fraction of the day airing stories of poverty and despair, closely related to hot-button political issues (USA healthcare, etc) that end in a tone of "we stated the facts of the matter, and the facts are that people are suffering." It is obvious that they are imploring the listener toward more liberal viewpoints.
    - lostphilosopher 9y ago
      Faithful NPR (specifically my local branch) listener here. I agree with your general point, though I notice it most with immigration related stories. The thing I appreciate about how NPR covers things though is that their commentators are almost never spokespeople/PR reps. They are legit professionals in the field, elected officials, or people who seriously study this subject matter. Of course they still have bias, but not _nearly_ as much as what I hear / see in other media which is "person whose literal/only job is to promote political stance X."
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  The BBC is pretty biased for UK news and for rest of world their bureaus are thin on the ground. Pre David Kelly they used to take their commitment more seriously.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. Pretty much all of them have some form of an “expressed commitment to political neutrality”, even Fox News did until fairly recently.. Of course, whether there is any substantive backing to the expressed commitment is a whole different question.
- abricot 9y ago
  Fairly recently? 1996?
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    They dropped “fair and balanced” last year, IIRC.
    - mmanfrin 9y ago
      Are you suggesting Fox was committed to neutrality up until last year?
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        Do you mean an actual commitment or an expressed commitment? They had the latter, but very much not the former, to the extent that the latter had been a source of jokes for many years.
msla 9y ago
Political neutrality is defined by the frame, and it includes the fact that facts, themselves, are political, in that some political views are incompatible with certain facts. Therefore, including certain facts in your worldview pushes some political sources out of the frame as being factually incorrect, which is a form of bias. For example, political views from someone who insists that global warming isn't happening are out-of-frame as being factually incorrect. That means a number of right-wing sites are gone, as the insistence that there is no global warming is more of a right-wing conceit than left-wing. The alternative is not ignoring anyone, regardless of how lunatic they are, which means you admit known nutcases like whale.to and Natural News into your news diet, and that will give you a very warped view of the world.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Also which unchallenged facts are emphasized. People who have a restricted media diet are pretty easy to surprise just by relaying objective information nobody really disputes that their news sources didn't deem newsworthy. Natural news et al may not be worth paying attention to but foreign propaganda outfits (e.g. Russia today) can sometimes be quite informative if read skeptically, even if only to add context.
- wintermutesGhst 9y ago
  This is an interesting idea for understanding how different worldviews form. Possibly also how sentiments like "facts have a liberal bias" or "liberals live in a fantasy" come about and ring true. The set of facts you use to judge who/what is 'in-frame' are essential to your understanding of the world. Someone else who treats those facts as optional ("Sure they don't believe in global warming, but they understand the issues with immigration") clearly has a poor understanding of "how the world works".
zaroth 9y ago
Reading your comment I immediately scoffed and thought, well what a cute marketing trick, I’m sure I’ll click over and just read more of the same.... Imagine my shock to see the top post pointing to RealClearInvestigations analyzing the role of “PROMISE” discipline policies on Cruz’s ability to pull off his attack even after over 40 run-ins with the police. Then again, the next half dozen link to articles about; a man allegedly attacking immigrants after yelling “Get out of my country”, Gary Cohen resignation, successful teacher strike gaining a 5% raise, Stormy Daniels sues Trump, and Kellyanne Conway violating ethics rules.
- tboyd47 9y ago
  Eh, maybe the issue is we're all so bad at recognizing bias that we can't even imagine what "neutral" would be like.

I use /r/neutralnews for this purpose. I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. It seems like an unfilled niche.

dagw 9y ago

I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. Sounds like you're looking for Reuters.

kerkeslager 9y ago
There are a ton of professional news outlets with expressed commitment to political neutrality. Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  Disagree. I think people want to be able to believe that their news sources are neutral. But I don't think they actually want their news sources to be neutral. That's the genius of what news has become: entertainment that justifies itself by allowing you to feel like you are doing your duty as a citizen by keeping up with current events.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    I think we agree that news sources aren't neutral simply because they express a commitment to neutrality. I think that we also agree that people believe news sources are neutral when those news sources aren't neutral. However, I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "wanting your news sources to be neutral" and "wanting to be able to believe that your news sources are neutral". It's both pedantic and not borne out by any evidence. You're assuming motivations which simply aren't apparent.
    - toasterlovin 9y ago
      What I'm getting at is this: people don't want to base their positions on objective facts. They want to base their positions on how they feel. In order to facilitate this, it is useful to have a news source that claims to be objective, but is actually slanted toward confirming the righteousness of the positions you hold. Thus, people want to believe that their favorite news source is objective (so they can justify their position with righteous conviction), but they don't actually want it to be objective (so they can avoid the terrifying work of modifying their worldview). Something apropos: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090
      - kerkeslager 9y ago
        I get what you're saying, and I'm saying that what you're saying is both pedantic and not borne out by evidence. The paper you linked concludes that reasoning (when done correctly) works as intended regardless of the motives for reasoning. Given that reasoning (when done correctly) works regardless of the motives for reasoning, when people incorrectly reason that a news source is neutral, it indicates that reasoning was not done correctly, and that their motivations for reasoning aren't a constructive explanation for why they didn't reason correctly (i.e. your point is pedantic). Further, the article you linked doesn't go so far as to disagree with my point--it doesn't make the mistake you're making, which is to assume that people can't want more than one thing. People can want to base their news source to be neutral AND people can want to feel good (i.e. not feel cognitive dissonance). Even if you were to somehow prove your not-evident point, it doesn't give you a basis to disagree with what I said, unless you can prove that people want to feel good to the exclusion of all other things they want from their news source. The article doesn't say that (i.e. your point is not borne out by evidence, even the evidence that you presented).
        toasterlovin 9y ago
        I think we're arguing past each other and I think that is my fault. In evolutionary psychology, there is a distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. So, the proximate cause for pursuing sex is that orgasms are intensely pleasurable. But the ultimate cause is that pursuing sex leads to better reproductive outcomes, so we evolved the ability to orgasm and, thus, a motivation to pursue sex. I think you are arguing in terms of proximate causes. Somebody desires a neutral news source so that they feel like they are accurately informed about what is going on in the world. I don't disagree with this. Most people genuinely want a neutral news source. But the weird thing is that they do not actually consume a neutral news source, even though it is trivially easy to figure out that your news source isn't neutral. All you have to do is read the other side's preferred news source. To explain this seeming paradox, I am arguing in terms of ultimate causes. I think that this failure to reason accurately about the neutrality of news sources comes about, ultimately, because news consumption is not only about informing yourself, but also to a large extent about reaffirming the righteousness of your in-group. And I think that the appearance of neutrality is critical to enabling this self-deception to occur (because a person is much more convincing when they actually believe the position they're arguing for). Thus my insistence on what you referred as pedantic: people don't actually want to consume a neutral news source, they want to believe that they consume a neutral news source. And not 'want' in the proximate sense that they know that they are deceiving themselves, but 'want' as a shorthand way to describe the ultimate cause for the prevalence of this self-deception.

kzrdude 9y ago

The BBC kind of does that commitment, doesn't it? As do many other public service channels, like NPR. See also http://ethics.npr.org/ http://ethics.npr.org/ Of course it can be discussed what the political leanings of the outcomes actually are.

Kalium 9y ago
I listen to KQED on a regular basis. It's a lot of things, but politically neutral can't be reasonably claimed to be among them. Not unless you think sitting square between 70s-type radicals and mainstream centerism is a form of neutrality. I generally agree with their politics, but I find the constant slant somewhat annoying. To put it another way: it's very possible to interpret fairness and impartiality in creative ways. And some NPR member stations make a habit of this.
- CompelTechnic 9y ago
  The biggest issue I have with NPR is selection bias. They spend a large fraction of the day airing stories of poverty and despair, closely related to hot-button political issues (USA healthcare, etc) that end in a tone of "we stated the facts of the matter, and the facts are that people are suffering." It is obvious that they are imploring the listener toward more liberal viewpoints.
  - lostphilosopher 9y ago
    Faithful NPR (specifically my local branch) listener here. I agree with your general point, though I notice it most with immigration related stories. The thing I appreciate about how NPR covers things though is that their commentators are almost never spokespeople/PR reps. They are legit professionals in the field, elected officials, or people who seriously study this subject matter. Of course they still have bias, but not _nearly_ as much as what I hear / see in other media which is "person whose literal/only job is to promote political stance X."
crdoconnor 9y ago
The BBC is pretty biased for UK news and for rest of world their bureaus are thin on the ground. Pre David Kelly they used to take their commitment more seriously.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. Pretty much all of them have some form of an “expressed commitment to political neutrality”, even Fox News did until fairly recently.. Of course, whether there is any substantive backing to the expressed commitment is a whole different question.

abricot 9y ago
Fairly recently? 1996?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  They dropped “fair and balanced” last year, IIRC.
  - mmanfrin 9y ago
    Are you suggesting Fox was committed to neutrality up until last year?
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      Do you mean an actual commitment or an expressed commitment? They had the latter, but very much not the former, to the extent that the latter had been a source of jokes for many years.

msla 9y ago

Political neutrality is defined by the frame, and it includes the fact that facts, themselves, are political, in that some political views are incompatible with certain facts. Therefore, including certain facts in your worldview pushes some political sources out of the frame as being factually incorrect, which is a form of bias. For example, political views from someone who insists that global warming isn't happening are out-of-frame as being factually incorrect. That means a number of right-wing sites are gone, as the insistence that there is no global warming is more of a right-wing conceit than left-wing. The alternative is not ignoring anyone, regardless of how lunatic they are, which means you admit known nutcases like whale.to and Natural News into your news diet, and that will give you a very warped view of the world.

crdoconnor 9y ago
Also which unchallenged facts are emphasized. People who have a restricted media diet are pretty easy to surprise just by relaying objective information nobody really disputes that their news sources didn't deem newsworthy. Natural news et al may not be worth paying attention to but foreign propaganda outfits (e.g. Russia today) can sometimes be quite informative if read skeptically, even if only to add context.
wintermutesGhst 9y ago
This is an interesting idea for understanding how different worldviews form. Possibly also how sentiments like "facts have a liberal bias" or "liberals live in a fantasy" come about and ring true. The set of facts you use to judge who/what is 'in-frame' are essential to your understanding of the world. Someone else who treats those facts as optional ("Sure they don't believe in global warming, but they understand the issues with immigration") clearly has a poor understanding of "how the world works".

zaroth 9y ago

Reading your comment I immediately scoffed and thought, well what a cute marketing trick, I’m sure I’ll click over and just read more of the same.... Imagine my shock to see the top post pointing to RealClearInvestigations analyzing the role of “PROMISE” discipline policies on Cruz’s ability to pull off his attack even after over 40 run-ins with the police. Then again, the next half dozen link to articles about; a man allegedly attacking immigrants after yelling “Get out of my country”, Gary Cohen resignation, successful teacher strike gaining a 5% raise, Stormy Daniels sues Trump, and Kellyanne Conway violating ethics rules.

tboyd47 9y ago
Eh, maybe the issue is we're all so bad at recognizing bias that we can't even imagine what "neutral" would be like.