4 ms·

All news is biased. Left, Right, Center is a false trichotomy. There is no such thing as objective journalism because the news is a filter. Even if one reports

All news is biased. Left, Right, Center is a false trichotomy. There is no such thing as objective journalism because the news is a filter. Even if one reports "just the facts", the facts one decides to report impart a bias. I might report that "a woman is suing McDonalds for spilling hot coffee on herself". That is an unbiased fact. And it implants a story of runaway litigiousness. If I also report that "McDonalds was warned many times about the temperature of its coffee and even sure once already and the woman sustained 3rd degree burns" the story becomes one of corporate malfeasance. Compound this further. I now state that the woman won millions of dollars, you may be tilting back toward over litigiousness. But if I report that she only sought damages and the jury awarded her punitive damages of its own accord the we're back to corporate malfeasance.

matwood 6y ago
IMO, the largest bias, which you left out, is what story is told at all.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  Absolutely. I can think of no better example than the recent moral panic over free speech. Because a few college kids on the wokest campuses in the country booted a few right-wingers we spent months covering every campus invitation as if it was the ratification of the first amendment itself. (I'm not saying there are no first amendment issues in America but who decided the events of a few college campuses were the evidentiary standard for a new social phenomena).
edmundsauto 6y ago
What, then, is your stance - do you think there is a difference of degree or agenda that matters? Or are they all the same, and should all be thrown out together.
- DubiousPusher 6y ago
  In terms of trying to sift and acquire information it probably doesn't make much of a difference. It helps to know each outlet's priors so you can distill the useful information. The Drudge Report is obviously biased but for years it was the best place to get the straight dope on natsec because they had 4th amendment sensibilities. Lately I've actually become pretty avid Fox reader because they're bullshit is so blatant it's very easy to discard it and take the value. This approach does have its limits. At a certain point you do hit Infowars levels of nonsense and all useful information is scrambled. Even if you want to focus on an ethical argument I'm not sure how to create a standard to compare them. Who is worse, Fox News who wears their bias on their sleeve or the New York Times who constantly hold themselves out as remarkable while piping all kinds of military and intelligence propaganda through to their readers. Who is worse? The organization that just outright supported Bush or the one that claimed to be a check and then held the illegal NSA spying story through an election? IMO it's best not to choose which is better or worse. It's better to know how to read through both.
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    Don’t you have to know the relative strengths of each so you can weight the information as you read it? That sounds like implicitly choosing which is better or worse. Another interesting point you brought up: how long a go should we look? Is today’s NYT still culpable for mistakes made nearly 20 years ago? (Not defending them, as I’m sure there are more recent examples. But when has enough time passed?)

matwood 6y ago

IMO, the largest bias, which you left out, is what story is told at all.

DubiousPusher 6y ago
Absolutely. I can think of no better example than the recent moral panic over free speech. Because a few college kids on the wokest campuses in the country booted a few right-wingers we spent months covering every campus invitation as if it was the ratification of the first amendment itself. (I'm not saying there are no first amendment issues in America but who decided the events of a few college campuses were the evidentiary standard for a new social phenomena).

edmundsauto 6y ago

What, then, is your stance - do you think there is a difference of degree or agenda that matters? Or are they all the same, and should all be thrown out together.

DubiousPusher 6y ago
In terms of trying to sift and acquire information it probably doesn't make much of a difference. It helps to know each outlet's priors so you can distill the useful information. The Drudge Report is obviously biased but for years it was the best place to get the straight dope on natsec because they had 4th amendment sensibilities. Lately I've actually become pretty avid Fox reader because they're bullshit is so blatant it's very easy to discard it and take the value. This approach does have its limits. At a certain point you do hit Infowars levels of nonsense and all useful information is scrambled. Even if you want to focus on an ethical argument I'm not sure how to create a standard to compare them. Who is worse, Fox News who wears their bias on their sleeve or the New York Times who constantly hold themselves out as remarkable while piping all kinds of military and intelligence propaganda through to their readers. Who is worse? The organization that just outright supported Bush or the one that claimed to be a check and then held the illegal NSA spying story through an election? IMO it's best not to choose which is better or worse. It's better to know how to read through both.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  Don’t you have to know the relative strengths of each so you can weight the information as you read it? That sounds like implicitly choosing which is better or worse. Another interesting point you brought up: how long a go should we look? Is today’s NYT still culpable for mistakes made nearly 20 years ago? (Not defending them, as I’m sure there are more recent examples. But when has enough time passed?)