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If your criticism is about news entities cherry picking facts or making sensational headlines then you’re gonna have to target more than Wikileaks and alt-right

If your criticism is about news entities cherry picking facts or making sensational headlines then you’re gonna have to target more than Wikileaks and alt-right journalism. Mainstream media, regardless of the political side, does this on the regular. I’d say it’s more this than “open objective news” by a large margin.

cowpig 8y ago
There is no such thing as "open objective news". Not because there isn't enough honesty in journalism or whatever. It's because even if you just published raw video footage, that would have to eventually be lossily disseminated by somebody in the form of a "story" before it reached 99.99+% of the world, and that lossy compression is going to be biased by worldview.
- phaus 8y ago
  Cognitive bias is something that everyone deals with. There are tons of techniques and processes that journalists are supposed to employ in an effort to minimize its effects. One example would be analysis of competing hypotheses. Another example would be an exercise where you attempt to find evidence that disproves your theory about a particular subject. You can't achieve a perfect level of objectivity, but if you put an honest effort into attempting to be objective by employing techniques to minimize bias, you can do a hell of a lot better than most journalists are doing today. When people say they want "open objective news" they are fully aware that perfect objectivity does not exist. So it should be pretty obvious to anyone reading a statement that news should be open and objective that the person making the statement doesn't intend to hold journalists to an impossible standard. They just want them to do the things that we and the journalists already know will work to minimize partisanship and bias. Instead they almost universally decide to manipulate the public and promote their respective ideologies.

cowpig 8y ago

There is no such thing as "open objective news". Not because there isn't enough honesty in journalism or whatever. It's because even if you just published raw video footage, that would have to eventually be lossily disseminated by somebody in the form of a "story" before it reached 99.99+% of the world, and that lossy compression is going to be biased by worldview.

phaus 8y ago
Cognitive bias is something that everyone deals with. There are tons of techniques and processes that journalists are supposed to employ in an effort to minimize its effects. One example would be analysis of competing hypotheses. Another example would be an exercise where you attempt to find evidence that disproves your theory about a particular subject. You can't achieve a perfect level of objectivity, but if you put an honest effort into attempting to be objective by employing techniques to minimize bias, you can do a hell of a lot better than most journalists are doing today. When people say they want "open objective news" they are fully aware that perfect objectivity does not exist. So it should be pretty obvious to anyone reading a statement that news should be open and objective that the person making the statement doesn't intend to hold journalists to an impossible standard. They just want them to do the things that we and the journalists already know will work to minimize partisanship and bias. Instead they almost universally decide to manipulate the public and promote their respective ideologies.