5 ms·

I think principles went out the window when both the new generation and journalists decided: "You can't stay still on a moving train." I.e., everything is bias

I think principles went out the window when both the new generation and journalists decided: "You can't stay still on a moving train." I.e., everything is biased, no one is objective, and no platform can be objective because everything has an implicit position (even no position is a position). In other words, a very postmodern "no objective truth can be obtained" take. So yes, the rational, logical next step is loosey goosey terms and conditions that change, cynical decisions based on who's talking, couched loosely in some sort of vague idea or principle. It does remind me a lot of the corporate world.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
I find it fascinating that people believe that there was ever an unbiased, objective news media. This literally has never been the case in the total history of the industry. Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Wasnt there an old ~8 hour long movie about the media making up stories to sell news? Edit: I cannot remember the name, I just remember being in JB HiFi in Australia looking at DVDs and there was an old black and white movie from the 20s or 30s about a guy who has a new empire but they make up stories to sell the paper and none of it was real. I just remember not buying it because the time was something like 6-8 hours long.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    And dozens of essays by post-modern philosophers about (e.g. Public Opinion Does Not Exist by Bourdieu [1972]) and subsequent psychological studies about inherent biases, which together pretty resoundingly proves the non-existence of unbiased media. Furthermore it shows that biases correlate with benefactors, so you can expect more biases in platforms which rely on shareholders, named donations or advertisements.
  - innocentoldguy 5y ago
    I don't know about a movie, but there have been several books written about media bias by people in the media. One example is Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias." (https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp/0895261901 https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp...)
  - iso1631 5y ago
    It's an age old trope - just look at the Daily Bugle.
- mancerayder 5y ago
  They used to try. Surely you can conceptualize a spectrum whereby on one the one side, people try very hard to be objective and be good at it, then where maybe they try a little less hard, or lack knowledge, or whatnot, and then continuing on the spectrum, where people throw up their hands and proclaim that no one can be objective, so who cares anyway. I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magically discovered being unbiased is no longer a worthwhile goal, so throw up our hands and take a stand on every controversial topic, pick a side every time. No.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Individual journalists indeed tried (and still do), however editors and upper management have always tried to steer their staff in the direction which mostly benefits their shareholders or their biggest advertisers. If journalists still persist and write stories exposing the wrong people, those journalists do loose their jobs and their stories do get canned or watered down (e.g. with equal presentation of “the other side”). Editors aren’t always evil and do this on purpose, however as humans we all have implicit biases. And our biases increase if we feel like we owe somebody a favor (this is why doctors are not allowed to accept gifts from pharmaceutical companies in many countries). If upper management tells a senior editor that company A is their biggest advertiser, and a journalist tells a story unfavorable to company A, then the senior editor might feel like company A doesn’t deserve this treatment and orders a counter story which exonerates the company to be presented on the same page.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Eh, journalists are human and many have very strong political and ideological views that are quite apparent in their writing. Editors try to tie together the paper into a coherent voice and brand, which also needs to be able to ‘feed itself’ somehow. I wouldn’t put anyone on a high horse here.
      - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
        Yeah, just look at the following: 1. I believe that I am a rational human being 2. My rational way of thinking has lead me to certain set of beliefs about the world and how it operates 3. I don't think about these beliefs all the time, because they make sense to me, but I reserve the right to change them should my perception change 4. It may take a while for my beliefs to change since these are conclusions I have made after thinking about topics rationally for a period of time. A sunk cost of sorts, if you will. I think that most people would see that list and say hey, there's a person who is probably rational and introspective. Now add the following: 0. I am a journalist 5. I report facts objectively but my decision making process on what is important to the reader may be affected by my human brain and my idea of the situation garnered from my experience with the subject matter and my human beliefs This still isn't the dreaded "media bias," although it's clearly a bias. We have more accurate journalism right now than in any other part of human history. We just have more editorialising too. What I'm specifically arguing against is that there was ever a time when there WASN'T bias in journalism. That's nonsense.
- xhkkffbf 5y ago
  Yes, they were never unbiased or objective, but they would often try to be a bit less biased and a bit objective. Now some journalists openly mock such efforts and see their job as creating a narrative that suits their political agenda. This is shocking to me and others because the watered down objectivity of the past was still better than nothing.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    I didn’t grow up in America so this might be different there, but I remember news from my early adult years and they were indeed badly biased. In the past 10 years, two things have changed however, the state media got more powerful and hired a bunch of qualified people, and—more importantly—independent media has proliferated. The media landscape of today is unrecognizable. Accountability hardly existed in the past, but now it does. You can see this by simply comparing the behavior of older politicians who were used to get away with everything and still continue their corrupt behavior, which today they are exposed doing all the time. If anything—at least where I’m from—the news is still biases (always has been) but this bias which used to favor the rich and the powerful, has radically shifted to favor ordinary people. The news of the past that I remembered were actively—and probably knowingly—biased in favor of their stakeholders. Today they don’t, or at least not nearly to the same degree.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    I think that part of the problem is that people confuse journalism, which is what reporters at newspapers and people in the field do, and editorialism, which is what normally happens on Fox and CNN. Editorials are not journalism, but when the journalism disagrees with people who are accustomed to the nature of the editorials they enjoy, they then see bias on the part of the journalists instead of the commentators.
    - macinjosh 5y ago
      Even if an article is written that only contains hard facts there are many ways it can be biased. It could exclude inconvenient facts (this is the most common), it can have inconvenient information at the end of the article where most people don't read. Some news can also just be ignored. Some parts of a story are never surfaced simply because no one cares about it or knows about it. Journalists are flawed humans like everyone else and expecting them to produce complete and objective reporting is not only unfair it is literally impossible. So no, I do not believe there is such a thing as objective reporting generated by a single human or a single organization. The only true, unbiased journalism would be some sort of technology that could let everyone view the full entirety of any event from any perspective without a human brain and sensory system in between. That's not practical. Practically speaking, it is up to the reader to consume as many varying sources as possible and then come to their own conclusion. But who has time for that?
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  > Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding. 'Vaccines contain Mercury' and 'this meal contains Chlorine' is correct information - there is an atom of mercury in the molecule of RNA and an atom of chlorine in table salt.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    I think you're agreeing with the quote? But your examples are not correct information. "We're all made of star stuff" does not mean we're stars. A molecule of RNA is not mercury and table salt is not chlorine.
- ska 5y ago
  I don't know anyone who actually believes that. However, recognizing that objectivity in journalism is an ideal impossible to reach doesn't mean all variations are equal, or that attempting to hew closer to the idea is pointless. I think there is a reasonable argument the the general state of journalism and and availability of news to the general public is worse now than it was, say, 30 years ago. Or that 200 years ago was worse than now. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but the arguments aren't prima facie wrong.
  - lazide 5y ago
    That view can only be supported by false nostalgia or a VERY selective reading of the material and history of the time IMO. It was a mess, widespread censorship, corruption, and yellow news was common, and it was a period of extreme social turmoil.
    - ska 5y ago
      We're talking early to mid 90's. I agree it was bad on all those aspects - but some at least are arguably notably worse now. How it nets out isn't obvious.
      - lazide 5y ago
        Oops, I thought I was in the comment thread I replied to that was explicitly calling out the 60’s. The 90’s have tons of examples of manipulation (Gulf War 1?), as do the 80’s, 70’s, etc etc. It’s hard to contextualize any of that without being embedded in it though. What age were you then?
        ska 5y ago
        If you are talking about mine, it never did. I haven't edited it, it refers to 30 years ago or 200. The one I was replying to didn't either, at least when I read it. Perhaps you meant something upstream or a sibling comment?
- brimble 5y ago
  Civics and history education (at least in the US, I dunno about elsewhere) is astonishingly, dangerously bad. Is the reason these notions are so common, I think.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  And even when they're regurgitating, they're regurgitating something written by a PR pro.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

I find it fascinating that people believe that there was ever an unbiased, objective news media. This literally has never been the case in the total history of the industry. Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.

philliphaydon 5y ago
Wasnt there an old ~8 hour long movie about the media making up stories to sell news? Edit: I cannot remember the name, I just remember being in JB HiFi in Australia looking at DVDs and there was an old black and white movie from the 20s or 30s about a guy who has a new empire but they make up stories to sell the paper and none of it was real. I just remember not buying it because the time was something like 6-8 hours long.
- runarberg 5y ago
  And dozens of essays by post-modern philosophers about (e.g. Public Opinion Does Not Exist by Bourdieu [1972]) and subsequent psychological studies about inherent biases, which together pretty resoundingly proves the non-existence of unbiased media. Furthermore it shows that biases correlate with benefactors, so you can expect more biases in platforms which rely on shareholders, named donations or advertisements.
- innocentoldguy 5y ago
  I don't know about a movie, but there have been several books written about media bias by people in the media. One example is Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias." (https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp/0895261901 https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp...)
- iso1631 5y ago
  It's an age old trope - just look at the Daily Bugle.
mancerayder 5y ago
They used to try. Surely you can conceptualize a spectrum whereby on one the one side, people try very hard to be objective and be good at it, then where maybe they try a little less hard, or lack knowledge, or whatnot, and then continuing on the spectrum, where people throw up their hands and proclaim that no one can be objective, so who cares anyway. I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magically discovered being unbiased is no longer a worthwhile goal, so throw up our hands and take a stand on every controversial topic, pick a side every time. No.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Individual journalists indeed tried (and still do), however editors and upper management have always tried to steer their staff in the direction which mostly benefits their shareholders or their biggest advertisers. If journalists still persist and write stories exposing the wrong people, those journalists do loose their jobs and their stories do get canned or watered down (e.g. with equal presentation of “the other side”). Editors aren’t always evil and do this on purpose, however as humans we all have implicit biases. And our biases increase if we feel like we owe somebody a favor (this is why doctors are not allowed to accept gifts from pharmaceutical companies in many countries). If upper management tells a senior editor that company A is their biggest advertiser, and a journalist tells a story unfavorable to company A, then the senior editor might feel like company A doesn’t deserve this treatment and orders a counter story which exonerates the company to be presented on the same page.
  - lazide 5y ago
    Eh, journalists are human and many have very strong political and ideological views that are quite apparent in their writing. Editors try to tie together the paper into a coherent voice and brand, which also needs to be able to ‘feed itself’ somehow. I wouldn’t put anyone on a high horse here.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Yeah, just look at the following: 1. I believe that I am a rational human being 2. My rational way of thinking has lead me to certain set of beliefs about the world and how it operates 3. I don't think about these beliefs all the time, because they make sense to me, but I reserve the right to change them should my perception change 4. It may take a while for my beliefs to change since these are conclusions I have made after thinking about topics rationally for a period of time. A sunk cost of sorts, if you will. I think that most people would see that list and say hey, there's a person who is probably rational and introspective. Now add the following: 0. I am a journalist 5. I report facts objectively but my decision making process on what is important to the reader may be affected by my human brain and my idea of the situation garnered from my experience with the subject matter and my human beliefs This still isn't the dreaded "media bias," although it's clearly a bias. We have more accurate journalism right now than in any other part of human history. We just have more editorialising too. What I'm specifically arguing against is that there was ever a time when there WASN'T bias in journalism. That's nonsense.
xhkkffbf 5y ago
Yes, they were never unbiased or objective, but they would often try to be a bit less biased and a bit objective. Now some journalists openly mock such efforts and see their job as creating a narrative that suits their political agenda. This is shocking to me and others because the watered down objectivity of the past was still better than nothing.
- runarberg 5y ago
  I didn’t grow up in America so this might be different there, but I remember news from my early adult years and they were indeed badly biased. In the past 10 years, two things have changed however, the state media got more powerful and hired a bunch of qualified people, and—more importantly—independent media has proliferated. The media landscape of today is unrecognizable. Accountability hardly existed in the past, but now it does. You can see this by simply comparing the behavior of older politicians who were used to get away with everything and still continue their corrupt behavior, which today they are exposed doing all the time. If anything—at least where I’m from—the news is still biases (always has been) but this bias which used to favor the rich and the powerful, has radically shifted to favor ordinary people. The news of the past that I remembered were actively—and probably knowingly—biased in favor of their stakeholders. Today they don’t, or at least not nearly to the same degree.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  I think that part of the problem is that people confuse journalism, which is what reporters at newspapers and people in the field do, and editorialism, which is what normally happens on Fox and CNN. Editorials are not journalism, but when the journalism disagrees with people who are accustomed to the nature of the editorials they enjoy, they then see bias on the part of the journalists instead of the commentators.
  - macinjosh 5y ago
    Even if an article is written that only contains hard facts there are many ways it can be biased. It could exclude inconvenient facts (this is the most common), it can have inconvenient information at the end of the article where most people don't read. Some news can also just be ignored. Some parts of a story are never surfaced simply because no one cares about it or knows about it. Journalists are flawed humans like everyone else and expecting them to produce complete and objective reporting is not only unfair it is literally impossible. So no, I do not believe there is such a thing as objective reporting generated by a single human or a single organization. The only true, unbiased journalism would be some sort of technology that could let everyone view the full entirety of any event from any perspective without a human brain and sensory system in between. That's not practical. Practically speaking, it is up to the reader to consume as many varying sources as possible and then come to their own conclusion. But who has time for that?
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding. 'Vaccines contain Mercury' and 'this meal contains Chlorine' is correct information - there is an atom of mercury in the molecule of RNA and an atom of chlorine in table salt.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  I think you're agreeing with the quote? But your examples are not correct information. "We're all made of star stuff" does not mean we're stars. A molecule of RNA is not mercury and table salt is not chlorine.
ska 5y ago
I don't know anyone who actually believes that. However, recognizing that objectivity in journalism is an ideal impossible to reach doesn't mean all variations are equal, or that attempting to hew closer to the idea is pointless. I think there is a reasonable argument the the general state of journalism and and availability of news to the general public is worse now than it was, say, 30 years ago. Or that 200 years ago was worse than now. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but the arguments aren't prima facie wrong.
- lazide 5y ago
  That view can only be supported by false nostalgia or a VERY selective reading of the material and history of the time IMO. It was a mess, widespread censorship, corruption, and yellow news was common, and it was a period of extreme social turmoil.
  - ska 5y ago
    We're talking early to mid 90's. I agree it was bad on all those aspects - but some at least are arguably notably worse now. How it nets out isn't obvious.
    - lazide 5y ago
      Oops, I thought I was in the comment thread I replied to that was explicitly calling out the 60’s. The 90’s have tons of examples of manipulation (Gulf War 1?), as do the 80’s, 70’s, etc etc. It’s hard to contextualize any of that without being embedded in it though. What age were you then?
      - ska 5y ago
        If you are talking about mine, it never did. I haven't edited it, it refers to 30 years ago or 200. The one I was replying to didn't either, at least when I read it. Perhaps you meant something upstream or a sibling comment?
brimble 5y ago
Civics and history education (at least in the US, I dunno about elsewhere) is astonishingly, dangerously bad. Is the reason these notions are so common, I think.
pessimizer 5y ago
And even when they're regurgitating, they're regurgitating something written by a PR pro.