6 ms·

> On one side, the death of traditional journalism really has opened up folks' eyes to bias in reporting. Having one or two main-stream news sources really open

> On one side, the death of traditional journalism really has opened up folks' eyes to bias in reporting. Having one or two main-stream news sources really opens up the possibility for bias becoming truth. This is not what I see happening. Instead what happens is people see news they disagree with and deem it biased. So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news.

dgritsko 6y ago
So here's the dilemma I'm faced with. As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, while also being aware that at least some bias is inevitable (no matter how well-intentioned the author may be)... how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?
- oblio 6y ago
  Well, there are some standard ways, just like when you do research: 1. Check out a bunch of their articles on various topics, the more controversial the better. That way you can kind of gauge which way they lean. 2. Find some other source, preferably several, check out their biases they same way. 3. Then compare some articles about the same thing, from all these sources. Look for stuff like references, sources, lack of weasel words or outrage inducing phrasing, aggrandizing vocabulary, etc. The more boring an article sounds, the more likely it is that the reporting is solid. Yes, it's a lot of work, but you don't have to do it for every article, you do it maybe once every few years, to re-evaluate the options.
- elmomle 6y ago
  I think this philosophical discussion is important, but just want to take a moment to point out that it often buries a pretty obvious lede and gives an out for aggressive bias. For example, last night every major news site had a headline about Biden's electoral college victory, or about Biden's speech, or about the virus. Fox News's huge banner headline was that Joe Biden had "a bit of a cold". This to me indicates an extreme bias. This is not to say other MSM sources aren't rife with bias--for example, all are staunchly pro-corporate, as they are owned by corporations. But bias does come in degrees; we must continually try to be aware of biases in our media, but we shouldn't treat all MSM as "equally biased and equally bad".
- loudmax 6y ago
  I don't know how to answer your dilemma that all of us face. But to add some nuance... it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods. An individual reporter may stretch the truth more than we're comfortable with, but as a whole, the big news outlets are more likely to make mistakes than commit outright lies that they know are false. Most of the bias is in deciding what stories to cover and what stories to ignore. They can't simply cover everything that happens. An organization needs to decide what stories are worthy of publishing, and how to frame these stories ("All the news that's fit to print"). And then which politicians do they want to ask questions of, and what types of questions, and that's even before deciding what experts, or "experts" or pundits or downright paid shills to comment on these stories. This is where the bias is.
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    > it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods Have you been not consuming news for the last 5 years?
    - smithza 6y ago
      Can you point to cases where this is common in mainstream news outlets? We are talking about exceptions, not norms. The 1619 Project and its revisionist perspective may have had misleading conclusions (or premises) but it was not committing errors of outright falsehood. This just an example of bias vs factual misinformation.
      - 80386 6y ago
        What's the merit in distinguishing between bias and factual misinformation? The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?
        6y ago
- 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
  > how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness You evaluate multiple sources to independently verify information, and you hold each source up to consistently good ethical behavior and accurate information. Basically, treat journalism like science, but a little more fast and loose (literally) because you can't wait for 10 years of research to determine how to act politically or economically.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Do something similar to journalists: 1) Cross-check. If a news source says something, see what others are saying. Especially others with no vested interest in agreeing with source 1. 2) (This is key, and where I think people tend to fail hardest) Reputation. Real news sources make mistakes. Real news sources print retractions. Real news sources have a reputation to curate. Guy sitting in his van ranting into a camera and posting to YouTube has none of those things and is not a news source. Keep track of who sucks and who doesn't and start down-sampling bad-reputation sources. 3) Separate news from analysis and know which you're looking at. A lot of news out there is doing more interpretation of fact than relaying fact. Be aware of interpretation---you don't have to disregard it, but remember the effect it has on you the listener (setting expectations changes how we interpret input) and the effect it has on the reporter (bias leads people to discard facts that don't fit and over-highlight facts that do). I'm personally always leery of stories that tell you what you should think before telling you what happened. 4) Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down. People in the middle of a riot have no idea what's going on. No matter what they're capturing on cameras at the scene, it's one vantage point of one event. What actually happened takes time to piece together from multiple vantage points. Resist the urge to let the scoop be the story for you and if something is important, do the leg-work to follow up on it and see what people learned in 1 week and 1 month. Medical and science reporting, in particular, often falls down here because they'll report on the first article on a topic and you never hear about follow-up studies, attempts to reproduce, or sometimes retractions from the original researchers.
  - smithza 6y ago
    This is helpful, and something I agree with mostly. Of course the difficulty is what you nodded towards in point 4: "Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down". We lead busy lives and need to digest news quickly. It helps when you have a few voices from different domains that you trust, where you can let your guard (relatively) down. The other thing that is helpful is your reminder to cross reference sources with no vested interest. The conspiracy-mongering journalist has a vested interest in his/her narrative looking convincing and will have a link to his merch site at the bottom of the article/vodcast/podcast.
- pletsch 6y ago
  I like AP and Reuters for my news internationally, almost everyone sources them. For more local, I try to find news aggregators, an example for Canada is nationalnewswatch.ca , takes articles from across the spectrum. This is really just for events though, when it comes to issues in tech, climate, etc that aren't necessarily an event, I tend to look to individuals in the field who don't go into politics for their analysis
- paulmd 6y ago
  > As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, There really isn't such a thing. What you report and how you report it is inherently editorial. For example Fox News simply isn't reporting on the conservative protesters that are rioting in DC right now (stabbings, property destruction, etc), or choosing to report it as specific, isolated incidents stripped away from the larger context ("a man was stabbed today in DC"...). They aren't saying anything that's false, and yet their viewers largely have no idea what is going on in DC right now. And conversely they frame Seattle and Portland as war zones where you can't even drive down the street without getting a bullet, because they are reporting every single incident and every broken window there. > how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself? Well, live streams are a way that you can observe an event and the context surrounding it yourself, and observe the larger discussions happening on that in realtime (people talking about the stream on twitter/etc). But of course that's another filter bubble. Also, virtually all official news media today has pro-corporate bias. Like, even MSNBC is owned and run by GE. I would say it's more important to understand the biases of a particular source in general, and try to evaluate which is more credible in a particular instance. But right now you can generally exclude most conservative-run media from any sort of credibility. Fox was outright established to be a voice for the Republican party itself (and there is no equivalent for Democrats), in the wake of the Nixon impeachment, because Murdoch felt that if the Republican party had been able to get its message directly to voters then Nixon would have been able to ride out impeachment (and he was right, this time it worked). From there the conservative media has gone off the deep end (OANN, Washington Times, etc) especially over the last 4 years. Criteria number one for credibility is "not conservative media", they simply have no interest in informing, only in defense and offense.
  - esyir 6y ago
    Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy". Looking at The NYT's and the guardian's content on Portland/Seattle riots shows you the exact same phenomenon there. I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility (CNN, Fox, et al.). Then I see even the closer to center but still unfortunately drifting away (NYT, economist, WSJ) as "take whatever they cover that's even the slightest culture war adjacent with a fistful of salt.
- jimmygrapes 6y ago
  Others have given great responses, but one thing not emphasized enough is recognizing the type of language used. It failed for various reasons, but The Knife used to do a textual analysis of articles and point out the manipulative language used. A quick example off the top of my head is recent reporting on the US election (all paraphrased, but I bet you can find real examples easily): "... baseless claims" "... without evidence" "... debunked conspiracy theory" These may be factual in some (or all) cases, but it is manipulative language. It prejudices the reader without giving the reader a chance to even consider the claims or theory. There's much to be discussed about dis- and misinformation, but overall the truth emerges only in sunlight. Also watch those adjectives. They love their superfluous adjectives.
  - f154hfds 6y ago
    This. This. This. I'll throw in a few other ideas: 1. 'Opinion' panels should come from both sides of the political isle. Thoughtful panelists should be able to get to the bottom of ideas (instead of getting caught up in partisan minutiae). If they can't have a good discussion they shouldn't be on the panel. 2. Recommendation algorithms _must_ attempt to diversify a user's taste rather than silo them. This is an ethical issue and may hurt the bottom line. 3. Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions. It is patronizing to have it any other way. 4. Context is key - sound bytes and cheap twitter drama are destroying journalistic integrity. Journalism is archaeology of the now. It should be treated with the rigor of a science. Have some respect for yourselves and we will do the same!
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      > Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions. I don't even mind someone spelling out the conclusion for me, as long as the article contains links to original sources so that I can verify it. But even that is rare. Most links in an article point to other articles written by the same newspaper. As an example, suppose a newspaper writes an article about something related to Wikipedia. I would expect to see the word "Wikipedia" hyperlinked in the article many times, but none of those links would actually lead to Wikipedia; they would lead to random other articles of the same newspaper that happen to mention Wikipedia. It would be probably impossible to get to Wikipedia from the news article by merely following hyperlinks.
- hrktb 6y ago
  The question I get me from your dilemma: it is worth the time evaluating a source for trustworthiness ? I see it as a proxy for actual cross checking every time, but more and more, cross-checking is needed anyway. Some sources could be permanently rejected, but ‘trustworthy’ sources consistently miss important information that only come in corrections with a significant delay. If we’re not taking the info at face value, the “trust” part is not there anyway. And if we’re talking about well thought and researched pieces, I’d argue we should also take the time to think about them and do our own sanity checks.
- jazzdev 6y ago
  I found this book a good education in critical thinking skills when consuming news sources: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-World-Add-Up/dp/1408712245 https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-World-Add-Up/dp/1408712245 Video link and summary of some of the books points can be found at: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/keep-your-emotions-check-and-three-other-tips-think-rationally-about-data https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/keep-...
vmception 6y ago
All you had to do was read their entire post
secondcoming 6y ago
What I see happening is people experiencing news being delivered in a way that uses obviously biased language and phrasing and, not impressed with being taken for an idiot, they go elsewhere. There they will probably find the same sort of bias and then conclude that MSM is generally useless.
macintux 6y ago
> So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news. Watching the phrase "fake news" become coopted to mean "news unfavorable about Trump" instead of literally "false information" was one of the more depressing aspects of the 2016 election.
travisoneill1 6y ago
I don't think it's that. People have always seen things they disagreed with in the news. The bias now is undeniably real. For example, the NYT has lost its credibility with me by firing its editor for running an opinion that I disagree with.

dgritsko 6y ago

So here's the dilemma I'm faced with. As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, while also being aware that at least some bias is inevitable (no matter how well-intentioned the author may be)... how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?

oblio 6y ago
Well, there are some standard ways, just like when you do research: 1. Check out a bunch of their articles on various topics, the more controversial the better. That way you can kind of gauge which way they lean. 2. Find some other source, preferably several, check out their biases they same way. 3. Then compare some articles about the same thing, from all these sources. Look for stuff like references, sources, lack of weasel words or outrage inducing phrasing, aggrandizing vocabulary, etc. The more boring an article sounds, the more likely it is that the reporting is solid. Yes, it's a lot of work, but you don't have to do it for every article, you do it maybe once every few years, to re-evaluate the options.
elmomle 6y ago
I think this philosophical discussion is important, but just want to take a moment to point out that it often buries a pretty obvious lede and gives an out for aggressive bias. For example, last night every major news site had a headline about Biden's electoral college victory, or about Biden's speech, or about the virus. Fox News's huge banner headline was that Joe Biden had "a bit of a cold". This to me indicates an extreme bias. This is not to say other MSM sources aren't rife with bias--for example, all are staunchly pro-corporate, as they are owned by corporations. But bias does come in degrees; we must continually try to be aware of biases in our media, but we shouldn't treat all MSM as "equally biased and equally bad".
loudmax 6y ago
I don't know how to answer your dilemma that all of us face. But to add some nuance... it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods. An individual reporter may stretch the truth more than we're comfortable with, but as a whole, the big news outlets are more likely to make mistakes than commit outright lies that they know are false. Most of the bias is in deciding what stories to cover and what stories to ignore. They can't simply cover everything that happens. An organization needs to decide what stories are worthy of publishing, and how to frame these stories ("All the news that's fit to print"). And then which politicians do they want to ask questions of, and what types of questions, and that's even before deciding what experts, or "experts" or pundits or downright paid shills to comment on these stories. This is where the bias is.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  > it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods Have you been not consuming news for the last 5 years?
  - smithza 6y ago
    Can you point to cases where this is common in mainstream news outlets? We are talking about exceptions, not norms. The 1619 Project and its revisionist perspective may have had misleading conclusions (or premises) but it was not committing errors of outright falsehood. This just an example of bias vs factual misinformation.
    - 80386 6y ago
      What's the merit in distinguishing between bias and factual misinformation? The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?
      - 6y ago
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
> how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness You evaluate multiple sources to independently verify information, and you hold each source up to consistently good ethical behavior and accurate information. Basically, treat journalism like science, but a little more fast and loose (literally) because you can't wait for 10 years of research to determine how to act politically or economically.
shadowgovt 6y ago
Do something similar to journalists: 1) Cross-check. If a news source says something, see what others are saying. Especially others with no vested interest in agreeing with source 1. 2) (This is key, and where I think people tend to fail hardest) Reputation. Real news sources make mistakes. Real news sources print retractions. Real news sources have a reputation to curate. Guy sitting in his van ranting into a camera and posting to YouTube has none of those things and is not a news source. Keep track of who sucks and who doesn't and start down-sampling bad-reputation sources. 3) Separate news from analysis and know which you're looking at. A lot of news out there is doing more interpretation of fact than relaying fact. Be aware of interpretation---you don't have to disregard it, but remember the effect it has on you the listener (setting expectations changes how we interpret input) and the effect it has on the reporter (bias leads people to discard facts that don't fit and over-highlight facts that do). I'm personally always leery of stories that tell you what you should think before telling you what happened. 4) Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down. People in the middle of a riot have no idea what's going on. No matter what they're capturing on cameras at the scene, it's one vantage point of one event. What actually happened takes time to piece together from multiple vantage points. Resist the urge to let the scoop be the story for you and if something is important, do the leg-work to follow up on it and see what people learned in 1 week and 1 month. Medical and science reporting, in particular, often falls down here because they'll report on the first article on a topic and you never hear about follow-up studies, attempts to reproduce, or sometimes retractions from the original researchers.
- smithza 6y ago
  This is helpful, and something I agree with mostly. Of course the difficulty is what you nodded towards in point 4: "Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down". We lead busy lives and need to digest news quickly. It helps when you have a few voices from different domains that you trust, where you can let your guard (relatively) down. The other thing that is helpful is your reminder to cross reference sources with no vested interest. The conspiracy-mongering journalist has a vested interest in his/her narrative looking convincing and will have a link to his merch site at the bottom of the article/vodcast/podcast.
pletsch 6y ago
I like AP and Reuters for my news internationally, almost everyone sources them. For more local, I try to find news aggregators, an example for Canada is nationalnewswatch.ca , takes articles from across the spectrum. This is really just for events though, when it comes to issues in tech, climate, etc that aren't necessarily an event, I tend to look to individuals in the field who don't go into politics for their analysis
paulmd 6y ago
> As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, There really isn't such a thing. What you report and how you report it is inherently editorial. For example Fox News simply isn't reporting on the conservative protesters that are rioting in DC right now (stabbings, property destruction, etc), or choosing to report it as specific, isolated incidents stripped away from the larger context ("a man was stabbed today in DC"...). They aren't saying anything that's false, and yet their viewers largely have no idea what is going on in DC right now. And conversely they frame Seattle and Portland as war zones where you can't even drive down the street without getting a bullet, because they are reporting every single incident and every broken window there. > how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself? Well, live streams are a way that you can observe an event and the context surrounding it yourself, and observe the larger discussions happening on that in realtime (people talking about the stream on twitter/etc). But of course that's another filter bubble. Also, virtually all official news media today has pro-corporate bias. Like, even MSNBC is owned and run by GE. I would say it's more important to understand the biases of a particular source in general, and try to evaluate which is more credible in a particular instance. But right now you can generally exclude most conservative-run media from any sort of credibility. Fox was outright established to be a voice for the Republican party itself (and there is no equivalent for Democrats), in the wake of the Nixon impeachment, because Murdoch felt that if the Republican party had been able to get its message directly to voters then Nixon would have been able to ride out impeachment (and he was right, this time it worked). From there the conservative media has gone off the deep end (OANN, Washington Times, etc) especially over the last 4 years. Criteria number one for credibility is "not conservative media", they simply have no interest in informing, only in defense and offense.
- esyir 6y ago
  Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy". Looking at The NYT's and the guardian's content on Portland/Seattle riots shows you the exact same phenomenon there. I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility (CNN, Fox, et al.). Then I see even the closer to center but still unfortunately drifting away (NYT, economist, WSJ) as "take whatever they cover that's even the slightest culture war adjacent with a fistful of salt.
jimmygrapes 6y ago
Others have given great responses, but one thing not emphasized enough is recognizing the type of language used. It failed for various reasons, but The Knife used to do a textual analysis of articles and point out the manipulative language used. A quick example off the top of my head is recent reporting on the US election (all paraphrased, but I bet you can find real examples easily): "... baseless claims" "... without evidence" "... debunked conspiracy theory" These may be factual in some (or all) cases, but it is manipulative language. It prejudices the reader without giving the reader a chance to even consider the claims or theory. There's much to be discussed about dis- and misinformation, but overall the truth emerges only in sunlight. Also watch those adjectives. They love their superfluous adjectives.
- f154hfds 6y ago
  This. This. This. I'll throw in a few other ideas: 1. 'Opinion' panels should come from both sides of the political isle. Thoughtful panelists should be able to get to the bottom of ideas (instead of getting caught up in partisan minutiae). If they can't have a good discussion they shouldn't be on the panel. 2. Recommendation algorithms _must_ attempt to diversify a user's taste rather than silo them. This is an ethical issue and may hurt the bottom line. 3. Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions. It is patronizing to have it any other way. 4. Context is key - sound bytes and cheap twitter drama are destroying journalistic integrity. Journalism is archaeology of the now. It should be treated with the rigor of a science. Have some respect for yourselves and we will do the same!
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    > Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions. I don't even mind someone spelling out the conclusion for me, as long as the article contains links to original sources so that I can verify it. But even that is rare. Most links in an article point to other articles written by the same newspaper. As an example, suppose a newspaper writes an article about something related to Wikipedia. I would expect to see the word "Wikipedia" hyperlinked in the article many times, but none of those links would actually lead to Wikipedia; they would lead to random other articles of the same newspaper that happen to mention Wikipedia. It would be probably impossible to get to Wikipedia from the news article by merely following hyperlinks.
hrktb 6y ago
The question I get me from your dilemma: it is worth the time evaluating a source for trustworthiness ? I see it as a proxy for actual cross checking every time, but more and more, cross-checking is needed anyway. Some sources could be permanently rejected, but ‘trustworthy’ sources consistently miss important information that only come in corrections with a significant delay. If we’re not taking the info at face value, the “trust” part is not there anyway. And if we’re talking about well thought and researched pieces, I’d argue we should also take the time to think about them and do our own sanity checks.
jazzdev 6y ago
I found this book a good education in critical thinking skills when consuming news sources: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-World-Add-Up/dp/1408712245 https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-World-Add-Up/dp/1408712245 Video link and summary of some of the books points can be found at: https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/keep-your-emotions-check-and-three-other-tips-think-rationally-about-data https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/keep-...

vmception 6y ago

All you had to do was read their entire post

secondcoming 6y ago

What I see happening is people experiencing news being delivered in a way that uses obviously biased language and phrasing and, not impressed with being taken for an idiot, they go elsewhere. There they will probably find the same sort of bias and then conclude that MSM is generally useless.

macintux 6y ago

> So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news. Watching the phrase "fake news" become coopted to mean "news unfavorable about Trump" instead of literally "false information" was one of the more depressing aspects of the 2016 election.

travisoneill1 6y ago

I don't think it's that. People have always seen things they disagreed with in the news. The bias now is undeniably real. For example, the NYT has lost its credibility with me by firing its editor for running an opinion that I disagree with.