8 ms·

Biased News Media or Biased Readers? An Experiment on Trust

46 points by tysone 8y ago

mtgx 8y ago
Biased media: https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/ https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...
- ComputerGuru 8y ago
  WaPo has become horribly biased in the past four years, it is like a high-quality, long-form Huffington Post. They always have an agenda to push and they don’t try to hide it.
  - pessimizer 8y ago
    That's pining for the good old days that never were; the WaPo were terrible before Bezos, and constantly printed editorial as news. All Bezos did was add the horrible linkbait headlines, and the barely-indirect talking up and defense of his own financial and personal interests.
speeder 8y ago
Sadly they only measured bias in the sense of how much people is biased in relation to the brands, they didn't found out a way to measure articles quality and then cross with the data they collected from readers. Example: in my country the most popular news outlet has lots and lots of haters, obviously there will be bias against their brand, but not undeserved, they admitted themselves openly to have manipulated news for political reasons in the past, caused some mass panic and ruined people lives with literal fake news, got convicted more than once for libel, and their reporters and anchors often express their political views openly on air...
- merpnderp 8y ago
  Is that like CNN threatening to doxx some random nobody because he made a political gif? That they're so biased, they're actively participating in the political game?
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > actively participating in the political game At least in the British system people acknowledge this as a reality of newspapers, which generally endorse specific parties or candidates. The TV news is more of a problem. I'm not sure the problem with BBC political coverage is bias per se as that much of it is terrible and includes inviting terrible people to be on Question Time because they generate lots of controversy. (It's also interesting that we on the internet consider doxxing to be some sort of Queensbury rules violation, while newspapers consider finding someone and interrogating them on their doorstep in front of their family to be standard operating procedure. Not to mention hacking their voicemail.)
    - repolfx 8y ago
      Well, in the UK TV news is supposed to be politically unbiased and neutral by law. It's not and the stations all have quite strong biases, it's not so obviously about specific parties but rather specific issues that journalists happen to care about. Moreover it's become common for journalists to openly admit to political bias and nothing to be done by the regulator. This is why I've come to believe that neutrality laws are a waste of time. W.R.T. Question Time, I'm not sure what you mean by "terrible people" (this itself seems like a rather problematic extension of political views to inherent goodness or evilness of a person), but it's pretty common for the BBC to fill Question Time panels with people who are not representative of the country, e.g. one person who is in favour of Brexit and all the rest are against. Presumably if political neutrality was aggressively enforced they'd try to match viewpoints on political panel shows with the rough proportions you'd find in the actual population.
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    Context: The POTUS broadcasted the gif. Afterward, CNN claimed to have found the original creator, who CNN had kept anonymous but reserved the right to de-anonymize them if circumstances warranted.
- AllegedAlec 8y ago
  > Sadly they only measured bias in the sense of how much people is biased in relation to the brands, they didn't found out a way to measure articles quality and then cross with the data they collected from readers. Yeah. It seems to me that they found out that people impart the bias they know a media company has onto the output of that company. I think a better rephrasing of the findings would be: 'people are not able to properly identify the bias of an article just by reading the content'.
  - grigjd3 8y ago
    That's backwards. People are found to assign a bias based on the source irregardless of the content. Do I trust articles from FoxNews less just because they are from FoxNews? If so, that's a bias on my part.
    - AllegedAlec 8y ago
      No, it's not backwards. It's very easy, even for a biased source, to make information in an article seem non-biased. Therefore, it's imperative to view the content of an article within the framework of by whom it was published.
      - grigjd3 8y ago
        You realize that your position is, effectively, circular, right? Your argument is that readers can't determine an article's bias by reading it. There seems to be a definition of bias you're using here that can't be measured.
        AllegedAlec 8y ago
        > You realize that your position is, effectively, circular, right? It's circular in the sense that because a bias is perceived from an organisation, the content of that organisation is attributed a certain bias by the reader, which reinforces the reader's idea of that organisation's bias. Although that is, indeed circular, it's also how humans tend to perceive and process information. > Your argument is that readers can't determine an article's bias by reading it. I fail to see how that is true. If I were to, for example, write an article about a contentious subject, say, for example the positive or negative effect of Trump on America's economy, how, from just the article itself, would you be able to determine whether it was a biased or not? > There seems to be a definition of bias you're using here that can't be measured. I didn't make claims about the measurability of bias.
douglaswlance 8y ago
The news media attempt at gaslighting readers to trust their authority. We need a decentralized information verification system. The old centralized methods are not working at our current scale.
- sbradford26 8y ago
  Maybe I am just being cynical but I feel like a decentralized information verification system would be a prime target for abuse. Would a majority opinion just become indisputable truth? I am basing my idea of this off of a blockchain based approach but I am not sure if that is what you are referencing.
  - 2038AD 8y ago
    >Would a majority opinion just become indisputable truth? Even worse -- a decentralized information verification system will endorse the opinions of the few while claiming to be majority-rule.
    - douglaswlance 8y ago
      If that were the case, then it wouldn't be embraced by the ever more intelligent public.
  - douglaswlance 8y ago
    It would need to be designed in such a way to protect against mob rule. I would suggest that it follow the Scientific Theory and implement similar controls for pursuing truth.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - notduncansmith 8y ago
    It would definitely be a target for abuse, but the socioeconomic incentive structures can be modified to encourage truth. Speaking of truth, framing is very important and for a platform like this: a majority opinion wouldn’t represent “indisputable truth” but rather “our current best collective guess”. You don’t treat knowledge in your head as immutable, you update it when you find better information (ideally).
gambler 8y ago
>The lesson from this and other studies of discrimination is that withholding irrelevant information can enhance judgment. Most modern news are irrelevant information. You can take almost any article and reduce it to a single paragraph without loosing informative, factual content. So why are we pushed to read the rest?
chrisco255 8y ago
Oh, it's the readers that are at fault...not the media themselves. This is like blaming the human condition without realizing said condition also applies to you. We are all biased. All of us. We are all tribal neanderthals with a thin sense of bias, period. As quickly as old biases are torn down, humans will erect new biases and causes to rally around. It will always be a battle of in-group vs. out-group from now to the end of time. Not saying bias itself isn't worth fighting. Maybe we can minimize bias. In my experience, the only way to minimize bias, is to discuss, debate, and digest a wide variety of views. My main problem with discourse today is that the very mechanism for breaking down bias (debate and discussion) has broken down. You can't debate things anymore without being labelled something atrocious.
- baby 8y ago
  > My main problem with discourse today > You can't debate things anymore I can't stop hearing this "it used not to be like this". Does this erroneous argument has a name?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jerf 8y ago
    If you mean "In the old days it used to be better", which I think you did, "golden age fallacy" is pretty close. I'm reading your argument that way because what you actually typed is simply that there have been changes, but there have been changes, pretty obviously, so I assume you didn't mean change in the generic sense. I attribute a lot of the belief that the past was an intellectual wonderland to the fact that in the past, only intellectuals had a chance to communicate over the mechanisms that were both widespread and lasting. There is a extremely effectual selection process on what has survived to be seen by us as we look back in time that biases us to see a more intellectual, positive time. As communication became cheaper, more and more people become involved, and inevitably that pulled the center away from the extreme intellectual center that it occupied before, by sheer regression to the mean. But there is one relevant change. Even fairly recently you could go online and hear people cite the idea that an argument is separate from the arguer, and that it's a fallacy to attack the arguer. That's no longer accepted by any culture I'm aware of, up to and including academic culture which has wholeheartedly embraced the idea of attacking the arguer and discrediting them at the most fundamental levels they possibly can. There's hardly even anybody paying lip service to the idea, except a few people who haven't realized that time has passed them by and a few diehard idealists. (Like me, who still thinks it's a basic foundation of anything worthy of being called "intellectual". But I recognize that my belief in that statement doesn't make it something that exists in the real world.) There was a time when I could debate things on the Internet, and if insulted, other people would cite the principle and ignore the insults. Now making unpopular arguments carries real risks of being the target of an Internet mob, and every argument is unpopular with a lot of people. Yes, that is a real change that has happened. You could argue that had this level of easy communication existed in any previous era, the same result would have obtained. I'd be down with arguing that humans fundamentally lack the ability to intellectually debate things at this scale and mob mentality would have been inevitable in any time in history where such technology was introduced and that there is nothing necessarily special about today's people. But it is a change that has occurred in the past 20 years for sure. Posting controversial opinions online has always required a certain amount of fortitude for the resulting responses, but there was never a mechanism that allowed the responses to magnify into a feedback loop so large that it could cost you your job or more.
pjc50 8y ago
I worry if this focus on "bias" is distracting us from the more important question of reliability. Is an article that gives equal time to pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine arguments "unbiased"? This is much harder to measure because it involves looking at news outlets retrospectively over time. A newspaper that accurately reports what bad sources have said may not be "biased" but can make the public significantly more misinformed.
candiodari 8y ago
Tldr: it is now considered discrimination to think that the NYTimes is biased. Clearly there can be no other reason ... But ... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well-known-liberal-bias.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well... THE ONLY REASON I SAID !!!!!! (When asked what the clearest sign of extreme bias in someone is, the above statement is my answer. If you're thinking of saying "facts have X bias" or "reality is biased" ... You've gone off the deep end)
vertline3 8y ago
In another thread, a person replying to a Google blog said software is about trust, because a person can't read millions of lines of source. Once trust is broken it's hard to get back. So maybe news is also about trust. Hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
- grigjd3 8y ago
  The problem I see with a trust model like this is that too often, people treat trust as a binary option rather than a scale. Like, "do I trust my android phone?" is not a yes/no proposition. I trust that it likely reports the time accurately. I do not think it a secure operating system. It has a history of reliably connecting to the internet, though it occassionally gets stuck and I need to reboot it. If I am stuck with a binary view of trust, which so many people seem to do, I either naively ignore the device's failures or I refuse to admit it's successes.
  - creaghpatr 8y ago
    People conflate fake news with biased analysis too. There's a difference between (in the NYT specifically) the first and second bullet point. If you look at any major headline story in the NYT- the first bullet is always the story, what factually happened, and the second one is the 'spin' which is where the alleged bias is found. Readers can still get value out of that first bullet even if they discount the second one- but it does get tedious at a certain level.
- dnomad 8y ago
  > because a person can't read millions of lines of source. But a person can read millions of lines of source code. It's perfectly possible given enough time and with a solid team you can do it in 90 days. Trust is not the problem. Nobody actually needs trust any more. It's a 19th century concept. Modern markets select away inefficient and unpredictable collaboration protocols like trust and replaces them with violence, transparency, and pervasive surveillance. The problem is the lack of verifiability. The vast majority of what comes out of the American media is unverifiable nonsense. Take out all the anonymous sources, leaked but undisclosed emails, "he said, she said", baseless speculation and the ever popular "reporting of reporting" (where media entity A reports on X simply because media entity B reports X -- even though X is pure bullshit) and what you'd be left with is the market data and live events. TFA is probably right that most Americans are hopelessly biased. But this may be the natural result of a media diet that is so completely lacking in basic verifiable information. Any conman knows if you ask people to believe X without evidence they will only believe it if they want to believe it (and they will believe it much more strongly than they would if you had presented evidence). Do this enough times and you can train people to believe anything, again without a shred of evidence. The end result is a nation of media consumers trained from a very young age to accept information without evidence so long as that information confirms their own ideology.
PedroBatista 8y ago
Both, but the media is more "agile" on their morals. The more I see the more I think many if not most reporters/journalists/media people are sociopaths. definitely not better than politicians.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  I think we can thank Twitter for exposing this. When you can go to a journalist's twitter page and see their actual thoughts directly (opposed to heavily edited and curated through their media property), you can get a better sense of who they are. What I found is that there's an enormous amount of group think and yes, sociopathic tendencies among journalists. They also tend to tweet a lot, like 30-40 times a day. Ironically the archetypal example of this is Sarah Jeong and the New York Times. That they would publish this article about bias in their readership, while being obviously biased themselves pretty much sums up that whole sociopath thing...
  - SolaceQuantum 8y ago
    That they would publish this article about bias in their readership, while being obviously biased themselves pretty much sums up that whole sociopath thing... By the best interpretation of this statement, it is highly confused as to what sociopathy is, and may be harmful in its belief that normal human cognitive biases are signs of mentally ill behavior. It makes total sense that people would have inconsistent metrics applied to themselves vs to others. It's normal human psychology.
    - malvosenior 8y ago
      I believe that the NYT knows they're biased and actively tries to conceal that (with articles such as this one). They also try to manipulate their readership and general discourse. So I'd say it goes beyond just regular, every day human psychology and into sociopathy or whatever the organizational equivalent is.
chriskanan 8y ago
What incentive do journalists have to not be biased? They are people and have opinions. Even if the opinion isn't explicitly stated, they often frame the story to inject opinions by withholding contextual information. I see this a lot in topics I'm an expert in. Stories are often biased to maximize rage/excitement to elicit more user engagement. I think the tools for measuring engagement have led to optimizing toward misleading click bait, and I would say that just about all of America's large media outlets are prone to this (to varying degrees).
- purple-again 8y ago
  Spot on. Which information is provided, what order it’s provided in, and the context around it’s delivery is often MORE important to uncovering the clear bias than the actual words being delivered.
  - jsonne 8y ago
    I had this argument recently with someone about John Oliver. They said it was as good as the news because he provided sources. I stated truthfulness was 1 of many dimensions about being unbiased. Which facts he presents, in which way, and when he presents them are actually equally important.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  It's not even a question of incentive, it is, as you (almost) said simply a natural part of being human. While there are a number of biases, the key one (for me) seems to be confirmation bias. In the case of journalism and (say) voting. The act of voting, like it or not, creates (and/or acknowledges) a bias. Of course, this applies to everyone as well. As a side note, of sorts, earlier this year I read the book "The Influential Mind" by Tali Sharot. While she didn't address it directly she explains quite a bit of the dysfunctional discourse in todays (digital / social media) world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyME0Idsq9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyME0Idsq9w
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  Even if the journalist is unbiased, the editor is usually the one who chooses the headline and whether or not to run certain stories.
diego_moita 8y ago
When bloggers, youtubers and social media accuse the media of being biased it looks like a bush doctor accusing the whole medical establishment of malpractice. Sure, the system is not perfect. But the alternatives are far worse.
romed 8y ago
In which we learn again that listeners of Rush Limbaugh are, still, the least-informed people on earth. Also apparently Rush Limbaugh still exists. Look: if someone spends decades ranting about how you can't trust anything anyone says unless it's him, that tells you a lot.
gibsonf1 8y ago
I remember how objective the New York Times was in the early 90s - they would follow the facts wherever they went and in depth - it was a great paper then.
grigjd3 8y ago
So my take away from this is not that readers are biased or that news is biased, but that we can't give up our own responsibility in identifying the truth. I am aware that news outlets are biased, but knowing that does not mean I can't read articles in those sources and learn from them. It's incumbent on me to put something I read into a larger context, to make educated guesses as to an article's correctness, and to think critically about what is being stated. Otherwise, I will make choices far more prone to some personal bias.
dooglius 8y ago
Unlike in the orchestra study they mention, the people doing the ratings have no way to differentiate between biased and neutral news articles, since they won't be familiar with the underlying facts involved. The only thing that can really be judged by reading an article is how eloquently it was written. It seems pretty reasonable to use brand perception (in lieu of anything else) to judge bias, particularly in political articles.

46 points by tysone 8y ago

mtgx 8y ago

Biased media: https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/ https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...

ComputerGuru 8y ago
WaPo has become horribly biased in the past four years, it is like a high-quality, long-form Huffington Post. They always have an agenda to push and they don’t try to hide it.
- pessimizer 8y ago
  That's pining for the good old days that never were; the WaPo were terrible before Bezos, and constantly printed editorial as news. All Bezos did was add the horrible linkbait headlines, and the barely-indirect talking up and defense of his own financial and personal interests.

speeder 8y ago

Sadly they only measured bias in the sense of how much people is biased in relation to the brands, they didn't found out a way to measure articles quality and then cross with the data they collected from readers. Example: in my country the most popular news outlet has lots and lots of haters, obviously there will be bias against their brand, but not undeserved, they admitted themselves openly to have manipulated news for political reasons in the past, caused some mass panic and ruined people lives with literal fake news, got convicted more than once for libel, and their reporters and anchors often express their political views openly on air...

merpnderp 8y ago
Is that like CNN threatening to doxx some random nobody because he made a political gif? That they're so biased, they're actively participating in the political game?
- pjc50 8y ago
  > actively participating in the political game At least in the British system people acknowledge this as a reality of newspapers, which generally endorse specific parties or candidates. The TV news is more of a problem. I'm not sure the problem with BBC political coverage is bias per se as that much of it is terrible and includes inviting terrible people to be on Question Time because they generate lots of controversy. (It's also interesting that we on the internet consider doxxing to be some sort of Queensbury rules violation, while newspapers consider finding someone and interrogating them on their doorstep in front of their family to be standard operating procedure. Not to mention hacking their voicemail.)
  - repolfx 8y ago
    Well, in the UK TV news is supposed to be politically unbiased and neutral by law. It's not and the stations all have quite strong biases, it's not so obviously about specific parties but rather specific issues that journalists happen to care about. Moreover it's become common for journalists to openly admit to political bias and nothing to be done by the regulator. This is why I've come to believe that neutrality laws are a waste of time. W.R.T. Question Time, I'm not sure what you mean by "terrible people" (this itself seems like a rather problematic extension of political views to inherent goodness or evilness of a person), but it's pretty common for the BBC to fill Question Time panels with people who are not representative of the country, e.g. one person who is in favour of Brexit and all the rest are against. Presumably if political neutrality was aggressively enforced they'd try to match viewpoints on political panel shows with the rough proportions you'd find in the actual population.
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  Context: The POTUS broadcasted the gif. Afterward, CNN claimed to have found the original creator, who CNN had kept anonymous but reserved the right to de-anonymize them if circumstances warranted.
AllegedAlec 8y ago
> Sadly they only measured bias in the sense of how much people is biased in relation to the brands, they didn't found out a way to measure articles quality and then cross with the data they collected from readers. Yeah. It seems to me that they found out that people impart the bias they know a media company has onto the output of that company. I think a better rephrasing of the findings would be: 'people are not able to properly identify the bias of an article just by reading the content'.
- grigjd3 8y ago
  That's backwards. People are found to assign a bias based on the source irregardless of the content. Do I trust articles from FoxNews less just because they are from FoxNews? If so, that's a bias on my part.
  - AllegedAlec 8y ago
    No, it's not backwards. It's very easy, even for a biased source, to make information in an article seem non-biased. Therefore, it's imperative to view the content of an article within the framework of by whom it was published.
    - grigjd3 8y ago
      You realize that your position is, effectively, circular, right? Your argument is that readers can't determine an article's bias by reading it. There seems to be a definition of bias you're using here that can't be measured.
      - AllegedAlec 8y ago
        > You realize that your position is, effectively, circular, right? It's circular in the sense that because a bias is perceived from an organisation, the content of that organisation is attributed a certain bias by the reader, which reinforces the reader's idea of that organisation's bias. Although that is, indeed circular, it's also how humans tend to perceive and process information. > Your argument is that readers can't determine an article's bias by reading it. I fail to see how that is true. If I were to, for example, write an article about a contentious subject, say, for example the positive or negative effect of Trump on America's economy, how, from just the article itself, would you be able to determine whether it was a biased or not? > There seems to be a definition of bias you're using here that can't be measured. I didn't make claims about the measurability of bias.

douglaswlance 8y ago

The news media attempt at gaslighting readers to trust their authority. We need a decentralized information verification system. The old centralized methods are not working at our current scale.

sbradford26 8y ago
Maybe I am just being cynical but I feel like a decentralized information verification system would be a prime target for abuse. Would a majority opinion just become indisputable truth? I am basing my idea of this off of a blockchain based approach but I am not sure if that is what you are referencing.
- 2038AD 8y ago
  >Would a majority opinion just become indisputable truth? Even worse -- a decentralized information verification system will endorse the opinions of the few while claiming to be majority-rule.
  - douglaswlance 8y ago
    If that were the case, then it wouldn't be embraced by the ever more intelligent public.
- douglaswlance 8y ago
  It would need to be designed in such a way to protect against mob rule. I would suggest that it follow the Scientific Theory and implement similar controls for pursuing truth.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- notduncansmith 8y ago
  It would definitely be a target for abuse, but the socioeconomic incentive structures can be modified to encourage truth. Speaking of truth, framing is very important and for a platform like this: a majority opinion wouldn’t represent “indisputable truth” but rather “our current best collective guess”. You don’t treat knowledge in your head as immutable, you update it when you find better information (ideally).

gambler 8y ago

>The lesson from this and other studies of discrimination is that withholding irrelevant information can enhance judgment. Most modern news are irrelevant information. You can take almost any article and reduce it to a single paragraph without loosing informative, factual content. So why are we pushed to read the rest?

chrisco255 8y ago

Oh, it's the readers that are at fault...not the media themselves. This is like blaming the human condition without realizing said condition also applies to you. We are all biased. All of us. We are all tribal neanderthals with a thin sense of bias, period. As quickly as old biases are torn down, humans will erect new biases and causes to rally around. It will always be a battle of in-group vs. out-group from now to the end of time. Not saying bias itself isn't worth fighting. Maybe we can minimize bias. In my experience, the only way to minimize bias, is to discuss, debate, and digest a wide variety of views. My main problem with discourse today is that the very mechanism for breaking down bias (debate and discussion) has broken down. You can't debate things anymore without being labelled something atrocious.

baby 8y ago
> My main problem with discourse today > You can't debate things anymore I can't stop hearing this "it used not to be like this". Does this erroneous argument has a name?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jerf 8y ago
  If you mean "In the old days it used to be better", which I think you did, "golden age fallacy" is pretty close. I'm reading your argument that way because what you actually typed is simply that there have been changes, but there have been changes, pretty obviously, so I assume you didn't mean change in the generic sense. I attribute a lot of the belief that the past was an intellectual wonderland to the fact that in the past, only intellectuals had a chance to communicate over the mechanisms that were both widespread and lasting. There is a extremely effectual selection process on what has survived to be seen by us as we look back in time that biases us to see a more intellectual, positive time. As communication became cheaper, more and more people become involved, and inevitably that pulled the center away from the extreme intellectual center that it occupied before, by sheer regression to the mean. But there is one relevant change. Even fairly recently you could go online and hear people cite the idea that an argument is separate from the arguer, and that it's a fallacy to attack the arguer. That's no longer accepted by any culture I'm aware of, up to and including academic culture which has wholeheartedly embraced the idea of attacking the arguer and discrediting them at the most fundamental levels they possibly can. There's hardly even anybody paying lip service to the idea, except a few people who haven't realized that time has passed them by and a few diehard idealists. (Like me, who still thinks it's a basic foundation of anything worthy of being called "intellectual". But I recognize that my belief in that statement doesn't make it something that exists in the real world.) There was a time when I could debate things on the Internet, and if insulted, other people would cite the principle and ignore the insults. Now making unpopular arguments carries real risks of being the target of an Internet mob, and every argument is unpopular with a lot of people. Yes, that is a real change that has happened. You could argue that had this level of easy communication existed in any previous era, the same result would have obtained. I'd be down with arguing that humans fundamentally lack the ability to intellectually debate things at this scale and mob mentality would have been inevitable in any time in history where such technology was introduced and that there is nothing necessarily special about today's people. But it is a change that has occurred in the past 20 years for sure. Posting controversial opinions online has always required a certain amount of fortitude for the resulting responses, but there was never a mechanism that allowed the responses to magnify into a feedback loop so large that it could cost you your job or more.

pjc50 8y ago

I worry if this focus on "bias" is distracting us from the more important question of reliability. Is an article that gives equal time to pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine arguments "unbiased"? This is much harder to measure because it involves looking at news outlets retrospectively over time. A newspaper that accurately reports what bad sources have said may not be "biased" but can make the public significantly more misinformed.

candiodari 8y ago

Tldr: it is now considered discrimination to think that the NYTimes is biased. Clearly there can be no other reason ... But ... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well-known-liberal-bias.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well... THE ONLY REASON I SAID !!!!!! (When asked what the clearest sign of extreme bias in someone is, the above statement is my answer. If you're thinking of saying "facts have X bias" or "reality is biased" ... You've gone off the deep end)

vertline3 8y ago

In another thread, a person replying to a Google blog said software is about trust, because a person can't read millions of lines of source. Once trust is broken it's hard to get back. So maybe news is also about trust. Hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

grigjd3 8y ago
The problem I see with a trust model like this is that too often, people treat trust as a binary option rather than a scale. Like, "do I trust my android phone?" is not a yes/no proposition. I trust that it likely reports the time accurately. I do not think it a secure operating system. It has a history of reliably connecting to the internet, though it occassionally gets stuck and I need to reboot it. If I am stuck with a binary view of trust, which so many people seem to do, I either naively ignore the device's failures or I refuse to admit it's successes.
- creaghpatr 8y ago
  People conflate fake news with biased analysis too. There's a difference between (in the NYT specifically) the first and second bullet point. If you look at any major headline story in the NYT- the first bullet is always the story, what factually happened, and the second one is the 'spin' which is where the alleged bias is found. Readers can still get value out of that first bullet even if they discount the second one- but it does get tedious at a certain level.
dnomad 8y ago
> because a person can't read millions of lines of source. But a person can read millions of lines of source code. It's perfectly possible given enough time and with a solid team you can do it in 90 days. Trust is not the problem. Nobody actually needs trust any more. It's a 19th century concept. Modern markets select away inefficient and unpredictable collaboration protocols like trust and replaces them with violence, transparency, and pervasive surveillance. The problem is the lack of verifiability. The vast majority of what comes out of the American media is unverifiable nonsense. Take out all the anonymous sources, leaked but undisclosed emails, "he said, she said", baseless speculation and the ever popular "reporting of reporting" (where media entity A reports on X simply because media entity B reports X -- even though X is pure bullshit) and what you'd be left with is the market data and live events. TFA is probably right that most Americans are hopelessly biased. But this may be the natural result of a media diet that is so completely lacking in basic verifiable information. Any conman knows if you ask people to believe X without evidence they will only believe it if they want to believe it (and they will believe it much more strongly than they would if you had presented evidence). Do this enough times and you can train people to believe anything, again without a shred of evidence. The end result is a nation of media consumers trained from a very young age to accept information without evidence so long as that information confirms their own ideology.

PedroBatista 8y ago

Both, but the media is more "agile" on their morals. The more I see the more I think many if not most reporters/journalists/media people are sociopaths. definitely not better than politicians.

malvosenior 8y ago
I think we can thank Twitter for exposing this. When you can go to a journalist's twitter page and see their actual thoughts directly (opposed to heavily edited and curated through their media property), you can get a better sense of who they are. What I found is that there's an enormous amount of group think and yes, sociopathic tendencies among journalists. They also tend to tweet a lot, like 30-40 times a day. Ironically the archetypal example of this is Sarah Jeong and the New York Times. That they would publish this article about bias in their readership, while being obviously biased themselves pretty much sums up that whole sociopath thing...
- SolaceQuantum 8y ago
  That they would publish this article about bias in their readership, while being obviously biased themselves pretty much sums up that whole sociopath thing... By the best interpretation of this statement, it is highly confused as to what sociopathy is, and may be harmful in its belief that normal human cognitive biases are signs of mentally ill behavior. It makes total sense that people would have inconsistent metrics applied to themselves vs to others. It's normal human psychology.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    I believe that the NYT knows they're biased and actively tries to conceal that (with articles such as this one). They also try to manipulate their readership and general discourse. So I'd say it goes beyond just regular, every day human psychology and into sociopathy or whatever the organizational equivalent is.

chriskanan 8y ago

What incentive do journalists have to not be biased? They are people and have opinions. Even if the opinion isn't explicitly stated, they often frame the story to inject opinions by withholding contextual information. I see this a lot in topics I'm an expert in. Stories are often biased to maximize rage/excitement to elicit more user engagement. I think the tools for measuring engagement have led to optimizing toward misleading click bait, and I would say that just about all of America's large media outlets are prone to this (to varying degrees).

purple-again 8y ago
Spot on. Which information is provided, what order it’s provided in, and the context around it’s delivery is often MORE important to uncovering the clear bias than the actual words being delivered.
- jsonne 8y ago
  I had this argument recently with someone about John Oliver. They said it was as good as the news because he provided sources. I stated truthfulness was 1 of many dimensions about being unbiased. Which facts he presents, in which way, and when he presents them are actually equally important.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
It's not even a question of incentive, it is, as you (almost) said simply a natural part of being human. While there are a number of biases, the key one (for me) seems to be confirmation bias. In the case of journalism and (say) voting. The act of voting, like it or not, creates (and/or acknowledges) a bias. Of course, this applies to everyone as well. As a side note, of sorts, earlier this year I read the book "The Influential Mind" by Tali Sharot. While she didn't address it directly she explains quite a bit of the dysfunctional discourse in todays (digital / social media) world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyME0Idsq9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyME0Idsq9w
creaghpatr 8y ago
Even if the journalist is unbiased, the editor is usually the one who chooses the headline and whether or not to run certain stories.

diego_moita 8y ago

When bloggers, youtubers and social media accuse the media of being biased it looks like a bush doctor accusing the whole medical establishment of malpractice. Sure, the system is not perfect. But the alternatives are far worse.

romed 8y ago

In which we learn again that listeners of Rush Limbaugh are, still, the least-informed people on earth. Also apparently Rush Limbaugh still exists. Look: if someone spends decades ranting about how you can't trust anything anyone says unless it's him, that tells you a lot.

gibsonf1 8y ago

I remember how objective the New York Times was in the early 90s - they would follow the facts wherever they went and in depth - it was a great paper then.

grigjd3 8y ago

So my take away from this is not that readers are biased or that news is biased, but that we can't give up our own responsibility in identifying the truth. I am aware that news outlets are biased, but knowing that does not mean I can't read articles in those sources and learn from them. It's incumbent on me to put something I read into a larger context, to make educated guesses as to an article's correctness, and to think critically about what is being stated. Otherwise, I will make choices far more prone to some personal bias.

dooglius 8y ago

Unlike in the orchestra study they mention, the people doing the ratings have no way to differentiate between biased and neutral news articles, since they won't be familiar with the underlying facts involved. The only thing that can really be judged by reading an article is how eloquently it was written. It seems pretty reasonable to use brand perception (in lieu of anything else) to judge bias, particularly in political articles.