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I completely disagree with your suggestion that reporting the facts has implicit bias. Leaving out specific details can be biased (such as if the attackers were

I completely disagree with your suggestion that reporting the facts has implicit bias. Leaving out specific details can be biased (such as if the attackers were also armed, or if the home owner owned the gun illegally) but reporting the facts while using language that is as objective as possible is in my eyes an important element of journalistic integrity. Investigative journalists do this all the time. Also for the record I am British, in case you were assuming I was American. Saying that someone shot 3 people during an attempted home invasion does not provide any cues as to the author's opinion on the morality of the incident, which is key. The idea that journalists have to inject their personal feelings into their reporting is partisan nonsense.

beobab 8y ago
I totally agree with you that reporting facts in as an objective way as possible is the end goal. Not "have to inject their personal feelings" but "inadvertently inject bias". The trouble with cognitive bias is that you can't see you have it. I have it, you have it, we all have it. If your brain refuses to let you know something (because of some shortcut that your brain takes to process information), you physically can't report it. If you think that something is very self-evident from the facts that are reported, you might not mention it, but you might be wrong not to. But once again: I think we agree that facts matter, and the main purpose of journalism is to present the facts in an understandable way.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  yes there is absolutely an issue of unconscious bias and I don't doubt it's a universal affliction. But this is why we need journalists to be non-partisan - at the moment we only have left- and right- news sources, meaning it's on the reader to piece together the real story by reading both sides, discounting leaps of faith that each side is all too keen to make, then combining whatever remains. Most readers won't do that, which I believe is a huge contributor to polarisation - people who only read left sources become further left and people who only read right sources become further right, and nothing ever seems to be getting better. I would pay a decent subscription fee to a news source that employed people with many differing perspectives to both pick apart the fact-reporting of an article, and to provide a separate opinion piece with explicit demarcations of the writer's political affiliation.

beobab 8y ago

I totally agree with you that reporting facts in as an objective way as possible is the end goal. Not "have to inject their personal feelings" but "inadvertently inject bias". The trouble with cognitive bias is that you can't see you have it. I have it, you have it, we all have it. If your brain refuses to let you know something (because of some shortcut that your brain takes to process information), you physically can't report it. If you think that something is very self-evident from the facts that are reported, you might not mention it, but you might be wrong not to. But once again: I think we agree that facts matter, and the main purpose of journalism is to present the facts in an understandable way.

beaconstudios 8y ago
yes there is absolutely an issue of unconscious bias and I don't doubt it's a universal affliction. But this is why we need journalists to be non-partisan - at the moment we only have left- and right- news sources, meaning it's on the reader to piece together the real story by reading both sides, discounting leaps of faith that each side is all too keen to make, then combining whatever remains. Most readers won't do that, which I believe is a huge contributor to polarisation - people who only read left sources become further left and people who only read right sources become further right, and nothing ever seems to be getting better. I would pay a decent subscription fee to a news source that employed people with many differing perspectives to both pick apart the fact-reporting of an article, and to provide a separate opinion piece with explicit demarcations of the writer's political affiliation.