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> It's a bit ironic that you would say that, even as others have complained that the "subjective" presentation is just weasel words and fake balance, i.e. sayin
by dunkelheit 6y ago
> It's a bit ironic that you would say that, even as others have complained that the "subjective" presentation is just weasel words and fake balance, i.e. saying "Some people think X." when you really really want to say "X."
Wait, didn't you just pull that trick on me, by referring to some vague 'others'? :) In seriousness, here is for example the Wikipedia policy that indeed discourages the use of weasel words in attributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Attributing_and_specifying_biased_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie... . The difference is, that policy explicitly prohibits presenting opinions as facts without any attribution so there is a temptation to write in some bogus attribution so that is prohibited too. In any case, an opinion stated with no attribution whatsoever appears to bear more weight.
Of course I am not advocating that magazine articles should be written in the encyclopedic style but I think it is important to be consistent. E.g. it is well-known that authors of The Economist write as omniscient gods and that's OK because readers can correct for that, but mixing styles is suspicious. And isn't it suspicious that almost all statements written from the author's POV in the article are negative?
- zozbot234 6y ago> In any case, an opinion stated with no attribution whatsoever appears to bear more weight. See, this is what I'm not sure about. An opinion stated with no attribution looks just like that, an opinion held primarily by the author. (After all, you can tell that it can't possibly be an uncontested fact, just by the subject matter. I mean, stuff like "news sites are not chasing for clicks" is bound to be controversial.) Whereas if the author says "Some people think X.", they're pointing to something that's supposedly the shared opinion of a whole group, so it looks a lot more relevant. Of course that's just my point of view, I may well be mistaken.