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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 "inadvertent
by 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 agoyes 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.