5 ms·

Who isn't a big fan of "impartial" news? People who don't have power

53 points by jaredwiener 2y ago

karaterobot 2y ago
> All of which is to say that audience desire for “impartiality” is profoundly contextual — embedded in the particular political, social, and economic environment that people live in. It’s less an iron law of journalism than an incentive-driven response to conditions. “It is up to news organizations and journalists, therefore,” the authors conclude, “to evaluate which approach better suits their contexts.” I'm not ceding this ground. We need news that strives for impartiality, and even if people don't want it, they need to get it anyway. The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago
  The point is that the closest definition people see for impartiality is "something that doesn't move the needle either way." In other words, maintaining the status quo. Protecting the way things are now is not true impartiality, it's prolonging systems. It's inertia.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    I don't see how an independent press striving for impartiality is somehow maintaining the status quo. It's just trying to report whatever news it has, which may or may not be challenging to the status quo. The alternative is propaganda. Also, I don't know why the status quo is inherently a bad thing, wouldn't it all depend on what that status quo was in relation to whatever issue? Shouldn't we ant a society where the status quo is optimal? Not simply being contrarians.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Being relative to the status quo means the news would be focused on maintaining the current state, regardless of if it is optimal or not (and optimal for whom, anyway?).
      - Jensson 2y ago
        No, focused on maintaining current state would be partial to maintaining the current state so would say that any change is bad. An impartial news would talk about positives of different changes, not say that change is bad, so no it isn't biased towards status quo.
        lazide 2y ago
        You might want to read the parent comment.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - BrenBarn 2y ago
    Maybe, but I think that's also a misconception that shouldn't be kowtowed to. Impartiality has nothing to do with moving needles. It's not about what's going to happen. It's just about accurate statements about things that have already happened.
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      There are an infinite number of possible events to report, an infinite number of facts about those events to report on, and in most interesting cases the "facts" may not be known or objective. Take these two different summaries of the arrest of O.J. Simpson: AP: O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and friend Ronald Goldman are found dead in Los Angeles. Simpson is arrested after a widely televised freeway chase in his white Ford Bronco. Alternate: O.J. Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, were stabbed and slashed to death outside her condominium in the trendy Brentwood neighborhood. The former football star was arrested after fleeing from police in a 90 minute chase along the 405. These are both accurate descriptions of what happened, and they give the reader wildly different impressions.
      - 1659447091 2y ago
        Maybe the statement above yours on accurate statements about things that have already happened. should be amended with: accurate statements about things that have already happened, => minus any added linguistic flair That second example has unnecessary additives that nudge emotion and has no place in journalistic integrity. At that point it becomes creative writing.
        AlotOfReading 2y ago
        Journalistic integrity is more difficult and nuanced than you can encapsulate in a one-sentence definition. "Linguistic flair" is an important part of effective communication. We're naturally used to picking up subtle hints that communicate meaning and what's important within a story (which all reporting inherently is). Stripping that out is changing the meaning of the reporting. The effect usually minimizes the impact of the story and implicitly supports the status quo. This kind of neutral fact based reporting was actually a staple of American reporting from the early 20th century, so-called "hard news". It fell out of favor in large part because it wasn't able to adequately communicate the gravitas of particularly emotional events. To illustrate, here's another AP story on the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, chosen as a deliberately extreme example of linguistic flair being used to educate an American audience on the little-known horrors of the Holocaust being uncovered in Europe: The U.S. 42nd and 45th divisions captured the infamous Dachau prison camp today and freed its 32,000 captives. [...] Jan Yindrich and I a few minutes later saw the same thing that greeted the soldiers -- 39 open-type railroad cars ... which went through the walls of Dachau camp. At first glance the cars seemed loaded with dirty clothing. Then you saw feet, heads, and bony fingers. More than half the cars were full of bodies, hundreds of bodies. Downward was driving a jeep along a string of cars when a soldier shouted: "Come here, quick, Colonel, here's a live one!" [...] This grisly spectacle was outside the walls of the camp -- along a widely traveled road inside the city of Dachau where Bavarians passed daily. I hope we can agree that omitting the emotive "linguistic flair" have been an inappropriate choice here.
  - eli_gottlieb 2y ago
    If I tell you that the sky is blue, COVID kills people, and coal emits CO2, that's "impartial" in the sense of being facts.
    - ryandv 2y ago
      As one who is steeped in the language, culture, and thought processes of science, engineering, technology, and medicine (STEM) fields you may be forgiven for believing that facts still exist. > I'm not ceding this ground. [...] The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative. The humanities have long ago dispensed with facts since the advent of postmodernism; the ground has already been ceded. Yuval Noah Harari summarizes this eloquently in his latest work Nexus: In the late twentieth century, for example, intellectuals from the radical left like Michel Foucault and Edward Said claimed that scientific institutions like clinics and universities are not pursuing timeless and objective truths but are instead using power to determine what counts as truth, in the service of capitalist and colonialist elites. These radical critiques occasionally went as far as arguing that “scientific facts” are nothing more than a capitalist or colonialist “discourse” and that people in power can never be really interested in truth and can never be trusted to recognize and correct their own mistakes.
    - lazide 2y ago
      Not arguing with you per-se, but…. The sky is also yellow, red, and purple in the mornings and evenings. It is also gray when there are storms, and black at night. Covid kills people, but is it a lot? Or a little? Many things kill people, but I don’t get worried about lightning or sharks. Some people do. Relative to those, how dangerous is it? Coal emits co2, but why should I care?
    - beau_g 2y ago
      What would your feelings be on a news outlet called "Public Health Watch" publishing 250 well researched, factually verified articles on dangers of wearing masks long term from 2020-2021 and zero articles on COVID mortality? How about a source called "Atmosphere Guardian" publishing hundreds of factual articles on pollution from solar panel production and li-on battery recycling while publishing zero on coal? The curation and focus of news sources can do a lot to not be impartial even when only dealing in factual information.
  - wisty 2y ago
    Impartiality is a process to get closer to the truth. If something is contested, then seek statements from both sides. Trust that eventually the audience will figure it out, and things will eventually no longer be contested (beyond some "lizardman constant" that is ignored - you don't need to seek views that are totally insignificant). The alternative is that people decide the other side is "false news" and now everyone drifts into polarised bubbles.
    - Capricorn2481 2y ago
      And what if a side is false news? There is news reported from both CNN and Fox that has been completely false. It would not be impartial to let them lie in an effort to get to the truth. You would have to correct them, at which point someone is going to call you partial. Journalism is about actively finding the truth, but you can see in this thread, people's idea of impartiality is letting everyone talk and shrugging.
  - felipeerias 2y ago
    The status that journalism still enjoys comes from providing an impartial and objective account of reality. A journalism that openly becomes just another form of political activism will lose what is left of that status. Why should someone listen to a journalist instead of to a random guy on social media, if neither of them is striving to be impartial and reliable?
    - Capricorn2481 2y ago
      This is a question that presupposes there are any impartial journalists. That is the point. I understand everyone thinks the news they listen to is impartial.
- MBCook 2y ago
  But how do we define/measure impartiality without reference to the Overton window?
  - lazide 2y ago
    Besides this issue, there is also the issue of who pays for it, and how are they paid?
  - beau_g 2y ago
    Do you mean for the framing of a piece, or the decision on what to report and to which degree/frequency? The former is more simple - 1. HORRIBLE MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (partial, even though it's within todays overton window) 2. FINALLY, AWESOME MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (partial, outside the overton window) 3. MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (impartial reporting) Headline is obviously far more simple though, removing most adjectives does most of the job, and goes a long way in the content itself as well. Something like choosing which photos to run or editing of video clips would be a lot harder to quantify impartiality/bias, both measuring and for the person doing it I think. As for overall article frequency and depth of article per subject, I think that's where your Overton window question becomes far more difficult - you could quantify a given piece or source against all other news sources and find the edges and the median, but yeah, in most cases just everything is biased by the window at the macro level. You could go back in time and find the dead center median bias media source publishing glowing reports on bloodletting and public executions.
    - weregiraffe 2y ago
      And all the while there's NO genocide in Springfield....
  - pchangr 2y ago
    You can define it in terms of language as such “whether the journalist uses rhetorical artifacts that distort the information to support his opinion, or not.” (1) More definitions and discussions can be found in the paper. 1. Francisco-Javier Rodrigo-Ginés, Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz, Laura Plaza, A systematic review on media bias detection: What is media bias, how it is expressed, and how to detect it, Expert Systems with Applications, Volume 237, Part C, 2024, 121641, ISSN 0957-4174, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121641 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121641. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417423021437 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095741742...)
- Conscat 2y ago
  In the anglosphere, we live in a time when minorities are aggressively persecuted by world governments and a sizable portion of their population. Now isn't really the time for moralizing about impartiality in how this is communicated.
- ElevenLathe 2y ago
  I happen to disagree with you here, but ironically therefore am suspicious of this "finding". It seems to both tell us that impartiality is contextual and relative, but also that it objectively exists and can be measured. The whole thing in incoherent. I think the bigger problem with our information diet is that we're constantly exposed to grade school level analysis that any twentieth century newspaper editor would have laughed out of the newsroom, whether they worked for the Wall Street Journal or Pravda. I'm ok with far right and far left rags sharing newsstand space (metaphorically) with establishment mainstream papers, but in 2025 very little of what we read is fit to be in a proper newspaper, including most of the stuff that actually is. Instead we get sloppy analysis like this that polarizes without illuminating anything. Even a committed Nazi can read The Nation and actually learn something. The same is not true of a committed Marxist reading the average right wing Substack.
- malfist 2y ago
  I'm not sure impartiality is actually all that great. At least the way it's currently done. Look at Elon's sieg heil during the inauguration. "Impartial" journalism referred to it as an "awkward hand gesture" or just talked about the controversy it caused. Very, very few journalist called a spade a spade, because that's taking a side.
taeric 2y ago
This is one I find less than surprising. At least, less surprising than the lead in implies. Would be like asking who wants news on the cutting edge of sports, versus who wants to know how their preferred team is doing. Now, we like to think people used to be more aligned on the idea of the nation. Or general well being of the world. I am not too shocked to see that people have aligned with cohorts based on perceived identities. Even if I find it disheartening.
- ternaryoperator 2y ago
  Clay Johnson's 2012 book, The Information Diet, discusses this phenomenon in the context of CNN going from a prime place in the news firmament to an also-ran when TV stations started driving news based on primary on their audience's political preferences. For a while, CNN still enjoyed a place as a definitive source whenever big events happened (national elections, disasters, etc.). But even that role was later subsumed by the biased TV sources. In addition to viewer's preferences for their political slant on the news, I think that when CNN gave up the 24-hour Headline News, that probably diminished their role as well.
  - sorcerer-mar 2y ago
    It is totally worth reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death for a (quite depressing) macro picture theory of this evolution and its consequences on our collective ability to reason about the world.
    - ternaryoperator 2y ago
      Quite agreed. It's an extraordinary book that's far more relevant than Postman could ever have imagined.
ranger_danger 2y ago
[flagged]
- zabzonk 2y ago
  > would it not be better to look at news from all perspectives Probably, but who has the time or the news resources?
riknos314 2y ago
For me, impartiality is the wrong goal for a primary news source. I want as close to the truth as is possible, with as little influence of the publication as possible. I want to have the option to take the in raw facts and contextualize them myself before I engage with external contexts. Due to this, I've been quite a fan of the forbes YouTube channel of late. They've been uploading unedited clips of events with zero spin, commentary, or contextualization.
- sodapopcan 2y ago
  Unfortunately… and I say this as someone who is prone to this… the vast majority of people (voters) need and/or want EVERYTHING summarized/explained for them.
  - mkoubaa 2y ago
    I agree, but those of us who do not want to outsource our thinking to someone else want nothing more than information.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  The great steve Ballmer also runs a just the facts YouTube channel which I found quite good.
wiseowise 2y ago
[flagged]
paulpauper 2y ago
i think the author confuses news with op-ed. If there is a breaking story, I want to know what is going on, but for opinions, ppl generally want their biases or worldviews confirmed.
somenameforme 2y ago
The headline is false. As per the data from the article itself, only 24% of Americans preferred partial or biased media. The overwhelming majority of people without power prefer impartial media. It just happens that of the relatively small percent of people that prefer partial or biased media, it's mostly made up of people with "no power." But even that is also dubious to plainly false since the article's definition of "no power" is very weird and includes anybody who is "ideologically or politically engaged", which is essentially every single person at the highest levels of power in the country.
- dmix 2y ago
  It's also arguable whether or not the list of people who prefer that sort of media "don't have power". It is defined in the article as: > (a) the ideological and politically engaged; (b) young people, especially those who rely mainly on social media for news; (c) women; and (d) less socioeconomically advantaged groups. People in all of these groups can still have varying forms of power and influence in society. Politically, culturally, or economically. This is borderline clickbait, which is sad because I like neimanlabs.
  - staticautomatic 2y ago
    What's at issue is not really whether they have power. It's whether they feel like they have power.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      But then it becomes even weirder, because what percent of all people feel like they have "power"? Excepting an utterly negligible percent of people, I'd think somebody was bordering on megalomania (or an abundance of naivete) if he said he did.
sfink 2y ago
"Impartial" to me implies avoiding any slant, and omitting anything that is biased in any particular direction. I don't think I want that. At least, not anymore; I used to consume lots of science-related news that would probably fit in that category. But for most things, I don't want to avoid hearing whatever the "sides" have to say -- I want to hear from every perspective. Sure, I don't want to hear from the extremes, because they aren't going to contain much information. It's all "See?! This proves that [preconceived notion is true]!" bullshit. I'm going to promote my preferred news source Tangle: https://www.readtangle.com/?ref=tangle-newsletter https://www.readtangle.com/?ref=tangle-newsletter It's US-centric and just talks about "left" vs "right". But then, that's all we really have left in this country anyway. It talks about a single topic each day, has quotes that tell you what each side is saying, and then some analysis and opinion that you may or may not agree with, but at least you'll have some sense of the space in which to think. I am certainly partisan and favor one side, but I will often find some sense in what the other side is saying, and likewise I will often find that many on "my" side are full of crap with respect to some particular issue. It's a good way to add nuance to one's own perspective on things, and to consider deeper questions than you would by constantly trying to justify your side's take on anything and everything. tl;dr: "all sides" news > "no sides" news
mkoubaa 2y ago
As long as they peddle "stories", they are not impartial. As long as they explain what happened, they are not impartial. I want information. I want it to look like this: Reporter X has information from Individual Y in the newsroom that the organization Z says, "direct quote". Then I want to mercilessly cull any entity in all chaina that has been shown to be misleading. I mean until the end of time. And I want this to be done algorithmically.
Apreche 2y ago
The seems to define impartial news as news that has no particular point of view. What does that mean to not have a point of view? Any news source is disseminating information. This always carries the point of view that the information being disseminated is factual. If we’re talking about pure opinions, like movie reviews, I would argue that isn’t news. Many people seem to think that impartial news is news that covers all sides. They share all purported and contradictory information from all sources without confirming which information is true, and which is not. This allows the audience to decide for themselves how to see the world rather than being forced to see the world as it is. The upside is not being forced to see only a false world as envisioned by others who may have unseemly motives. The downside is many are left confused and unsure what is true. This defeats the purpose of news entirely, as the audience is just as uninformed after reading as they were before. The only truly impartial news source is one that will adhere to rigorous standards of evidence. Given all the available information they will take a firm stand in declaring what the facts are, and to what degree of certainty. The problem is that in a world with vaccine deniers, climate denial, etc. a purely fact-based and impartial source of news would be branded as very extremist.
- freen 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ryandv 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - weregiraffe 2y ago
    And people dislike biases, which is why reality can't win elections...
  - tomhow 2y ago
    Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- 2y ago
ryandv 2y ago
> News outlets exist, in one sense at least, to serve their audiences. But they also exist to serve their advertisers. And their journalists exist in an uneasy symbiosis with a community’s institutions — government, police, schools, business, civil society — which are the subject of much of their work. Does “impartial” news represent a purity of audience service? Or some triangulation of all the various power sources and elite stakeholders that interact with it? Not a new idea. Chomsky & Herman talked about the incident forces and special interests that act upon the government/media/advertising complex and the degree to which these forces influenced the content of mass media and television in the 80s in their book Manufacturing Consent. Similar considerations apply in the age of social media today.
lyu07282 2y ago
The whole idea that there is such a thing as impartial or unbiased news is a deeply flawed idea that is itself a strong ideological position. Everyone is biased, ideological and partial, some may claim they aren't, but it's just a lie. The media has failed everyone miserably over and over and over again in the last decades and has consistently failed to take accountability. I still vividly remember the media's disgusting mouth-foaming psychotic hysteria in support of the Iraq war and the ferociousness in which they barked at anyone who dares to speak the truth. Or the countless times they prevented leaks of the most disgusting crimes of the state to be published, or how they threw their own sources into the fire to protect the most vile warmongers. I feel nothing but contempt for journalism.
- lazide 2y ago
  The challenge here is, what is the alternative?
beloch 2y ago
In recent years, I've come to appreciate "Talking Head" panel discussions when it comes to topics of great partiality, such as politics. Specifically, those that gather heads with differing opinions. e.g. CBC Canada's "Power & Politics" panels. If you take people from opposite ends of the spectrum and put them in a well moderated environment, the discussion that results often helps you to appreciate the different angles that people approach political issues from. Aside from in the U.S. during recent years, political issues are usually a matter of perspective and shades of grey. i.e. If there is a black and white scientific consensus on a given topic, it rarely becomes a political topic (except recently in the U.S.). It's when people with different opinions explain their position and try to sway each other that you're most likely to see arguments that actually have some merit. Even if you are not swayed by an argument, at least you can get a sense of why somebody with a different perspective sees the issue that way. Unfortunately, at lot of people, and I'll leave it up to others to speculate on who those predominantly are, are not curious about or interested in views that don't align with their own. They may perceive exposure to such views as aggression. i.e. If you express a view they don't agree with, they may see it as an attempt to force them to align with that view. This perception of persuasion as aggression may explain why some scientifically black and white issues have become political.
- giantg2 2y ago
  "If there is a black and white scientific consensus on a given topic, it rarely becomes a political topic" Science is one thing. How to implement that in policy is a different thing, and often is political.
- ryandv 2y ago
  This sounds like a reprisal of the common far right bigoted refrain to platform "both sides" when we all know that reality obviously has a liberal bias [0]. This dog whistle for free speech was also used by John Stuart Mill, an influential figure in classical liberalism, the movement that provided the ideological roots of the modern alt-right extremist movement, in his treatise On Liberty from 1859 [1]: It is also often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practise. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43628756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43628756 [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm
travisjungroth 2y ago
Critically, this is a stated versus a revealed preference. All these surveys tell you is that people in these groups are less likely to have a self image of valuing impartial news. It doesn’t tell you about their actual habits.
- staticautomatic 2y ago
  While this is generally true, people do actually tend to consume media that comports with their existing or desired self-image. Source: I run insights & analytics for a media company.
neo1250 2y ago
Do we have any documentation of the "revealed preferences" of the major news publications today? You would imagine that this bias/preference is readily available for internal (national) news outlets just like they are for international news sources. So many employees of these major news outlets have spoken up on the recent forced biased coverage in politics, war-time, conflicts etc. It would be nice to have a live cheatsheet to refer to any active biases being introduced by these major news outlets (and possibly linking their editorial/ownership relationships as well)
- SanjayMehta 2y ago
  Ashley Rindsberg discusses NYT in his book “The Gray Lady Winked.”
ragtagtag 2y ago
This is one area where richer countries can learn a lot from poorer countries, should they choose to listen. When I lived in Liberia, there were about 10-15 different newspapers in the capital, from websites to print to one guy with a massive chalk board on the main road. This diversity of sources served quite a small population, but there was a massive appetite for news. In such a situation, you don't expect impartiality, but each news organisation's perspective sites is more obvious, and reading about events from multiple perspectives gives, in my view, a broader and clearer window into what happened. I think it could make sense to value in news, not impartiality, but diversity of viewpoints. Conveniently, the internet does make this much easier.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Alomg those same lines, even if something is considered impartial, we would need to gather multiple viewpoints to fact check that it actually is impartial.
ConspiracyFact 2y ago
>People belonging to socially disadvantaged groups, such as women When can we stop with this?
IAmGraydon 2y ago
Couldn't we have done without the double negative and had a simpler and more effective headline?
randcraw 2y ago
It's likely that the people who like impartial news the least are those who want a reporter to digest the raw data for them and then summarize it. They don't want to have to hunt and gather raw news from multiple sources or filter out logical inconsistencies or unreliable data. They want a message that has been simplified, made palatable. They want someone else to do the analytical heavy lifting for them. I suspect most of us also want news that doesn't make us think too hard. Don't take me out of my comfort zone, or challenge my presumptions and preferences. No surprises, please. Allow me to remain confident that my beliefs need no revision and my 'bubble' can remain unpunctured. Alternately, I would have thought that a better measure of impartiality would be personal curiosity -- the desire to learn what you don't know and correct your misunderstandings, and the quest for news that ensues.
baazaa 2y ago
Or in other words dumb people are less impacted by social desirability bias when responding to the survey because they don't realise that 'impartiality' is something to be desired. As for why impartial news does so poorly in practice, it's often because it's utterly uninformative. 'Car bomb goes off in Kabul' is worthless info to 100% of the population, whereas the moment you try to contextualise it 'Car bomb goes off in Kabul, which is becoming more frequent, which suggests administration is lying about how well the occupation is going' then you're no longer impartial. Journalists and editors have spent the better part of a century stripping all useful information out of their articles in an effort to be impartial. It would be much better if they instead aimed for a diversity of opinions than a mythical objectivity devoid of ideological bias.
dsign 2y ago
"Impartial news"? Here is a fringe position of mine which I'll be happy for you to turn to shreds, or at least illuminate: rational consensus is being stabbed to death. If we are to live in democracy, we need consensus to be able to do important things. Without those important things, "bad things" happen. Say, you don't get medical care. Or a pandemic of a preventable disease kills a lot of people who don't have access to a vaccine or who don't want to be vaccinated. Here, you may say, "hey, my definition of bad thing is different than yours. Who are you to decide?". And now you are starting to see the problem. So, we need consensus. And a good way to reach consensus is for people to have access to facts and to be able to make sense of those facts. But in an increasingly complicated world, both things are very difficult. Making sense of facts requires advanced mental tools: previous knowledge, reading skills, mathematics and logic. Those skills are under siege by forces that compete to engage people with dopamine-inducing content: social media, cable-news, video-games, politicians in campaign trails, etc. You as an individual may perhaps have enough reason, but at a group level, the critical mass for rational consensus is not there. The endgame of that train is lack of social trust and anarchy. But "fortunately", before getting there, people turn to strong figures and/or to violent ideologies that suppress the "other". The worst part is that I don't think there is a democracy-preserving solution to this problem, at least not for societies which are already incapable of reaching rational consensus. USA should prepare for its age of stabby emperors[^1]. [^1]: Please don't take this last statement seriously, I'm just goading you with dopamine-inducing content.
JadoJodo 2y ago
I don’t mind partial news. What I _do_ mind is partial news that _masquerades_ as impartial news. I will happily read a well written piece authored by someone with whom I may or may not disagree who is up front about their bend. But when you’re telling me that this policy is Donald Trump playing 4D chess or that Joe Biden is the sharpest he’s ever been, and follow it up with some variation of “I’m a[n unbiased] journalist”, I’m out.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
Honestly I could do without any news at all! My father is profoundly addicted to consuming news media in every form possible. Never a day went by in my childhood without him hiding behind the daily newspaper (and then relating back all he read) and tuning in to every news on every TV channel. It was single-minded and exhausting, even compared to my own voracious and indiscriminate addiction. I’ve never wanted to hear irrelevant shitty news stories. They are all 100% geopolitical gossip and only designed to control us, pacify us and/or engender F.U.D., and also to sell advertising. News media has nearly nothing to do with what an urban human needs to get by in daily life. The days that pass without me being lured in to some shitty RSS feed of clickbait, those are good days. I prefer to go to primary sources today so I simply keep open a tab on weather.gov, Google Maps for traffic or transit schedules, and YT channels from the Holy See & the People’s House for ceremonies and press briefings. Also the Wikipedia Main Page keeps me informed about the latest global obituaries and really big deals. People are being led around by the nose by shitty 24/7 news cycles that consist 99% in stuff that’s bread & circuses. Living our lives should never depend on what’s on TV.
esbranson 2y ago
I am a Wikipedian who edits on government and law, and no, neither NPR nor PBS (WETA) NewsHour are anywhere near impartial. The notion that left-of-center consumers have impartial news is laughable. The US does not have a BBC.

53 points by jaredwiener 2y ago

> All of which is to say that audience desire for “impartiality” is profoundly contextual — embedded in the particular political, social, and economic environment that people live in. It’s less an iron law of journalism than an incentive-driven response to conditions. “It is up to news organizations and journalists, therefore,” the authors conclude, “to evaluate which approach better suits their contexts.” I'm not ceding this ground. We need news that strives for impartiality, and even if people don't want it, they need to get it anyway. The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative.

Capricorn2481 2y ago
The point is that the closest definition people see for impartiality is "something that doesn't move the needle either way." In other words, maintaining the status quo. Protecting the way things are now is not true impartiality, it's prolonging systems. It's inertia.
- goatlover 2y ago
  I don't see how an independent press striving for impartiality is somehow maintaining the status quo. It's just trying to report whatever news it has, which may or may not be challenging to the status quo. The alternative is propaganda. Also, I don't know why the status quo is inherently a bad thing, wouldn't it all depend on what that status quo was in relation to whatever issue? Shouldn't we ant a society where the status quo is optimal? Not simply being contrarians.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Being relative to the status quo means the news would be focused on maintaining the current state, regardless of if it is optimal or not (and optimal for whom, anyway?).
    - Jensson 2y ago
      No, focused on maintaining current state would be partial to maintaining the current state so would say that any change is bad. An impartial news would talk about positives of different changes, not say that change is bad, so no it isn't biased towards status quo.
      - lazide 2y ago
        You might want to read the parent comment.
- deleted 2y ago
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- BrenBarn 2y ago
  Maybe, but I think that's also a misconception that shouldn't be kowtowed to. Impartiality has nothing to do with moving needles. It's not about what's going to happen. It's just about accurate statements about things that have already happened.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    There are an infinite number of possible events to report, an infinite number of facts about those events to report on, and in most interesting cases the "facts" may not be known or objective. Take these two different summaries of the arrest of O.J. Simpson: AP: O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and friend Ronald Goldman are found dead in Los Angeles. Simpson is arrested after a widely televised freeway chase in his white Ford Bronco. Alternate: O.J. Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, were stabbed and slashed to death outside her condominium in the trendy Brentwood neighborhood. The former football star was arrested after fleeing from police in a 90 minute chase along the 405. These are both accurate descriptions of what happened, and they give the reader wildly different impressions.
    - 1659447091 2y ago
      Maybe the statement above yours on accurate statements about things that have already happened. should be amended with: accurate statements about things that have already happened, => minus any added linguistic flair That second example has unnecessary additives that nudge emotion and has no place in journalistic integrity. At that point it becomes creative writing.
      - AlotOfReading 2y ago
        Journalistic integrity is more difficult and nuanced than you can encapsulate in a one-sentence definition. "Linguistic flair" is an important part of effective communication. We're naturally used to picking up subtle hints that communicate meaning and what's important within a story (which all reporting inherently is). Stripping that out is changing the meaning of the reporting. The effect usually minimizes the impact of the story and implicitly supports the status quo. This kind of neutral fact based reporting was actually a staple of American reporting from the early 20th century, so-called "hard news". It fell out of favor in large part because it wasn't able to adequately communicate the gravitas of particularly emotional events. To illustrate, here's another AP story on the liberation of Dachau concentration camp, chosen as a deliberately extreme example of linguistic flair being used to educate an American audience on the little-known horrors of the Holocaust being uncovered in Europe: The U.S. 42nd and 45th divisions captured the infamous Dachau prison camp today and freed its 32,000 captives. [...] Jan Yindrich and I a few minutes later saw the same thing that greeted the soldiers -- 39 open-type railroad cars ... which went through the walls of Dachau camp. At first glance the cars seemed loaded with dirty clothing. Then you saw feet, heads, and bony fingers. More than half the cars were full of bodies, hundreds of bodies. Downward was driving a jeep along a string of cars when a soldier shouted: "Come here, quick, Colonel, here's a live one!" [...] This grisly spectacle was outside the walls of the camp -- along a widely traveled road inside the city of Dachau where Bavarians passed daily. I hope we can agree that omitting the emotive "linguistic flair" have been an inappropriate choice here.
- eli_gottlieb 2y ago
  If I tell you that the sky is blue, COVID kills people, and coal emits CO2, that's "impartial" in the sense of being facts.
  - ryandv 2y ago
    As one who is steeped in the language, culture, and thought processes of science, engineering, technology, and medicine (STEM) fields you may be forgiven for believing that facts still exist. > I'm not ceding this ground. [...] The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative. The humanities have long ago dispensed with facts since the advent of postmodernism; the ground has already been ceded. Yuval Noah Harari summarizes this eloquently in his latest work Nexus: In the late twentieth century, for example, intellectuals from the radical left like Michel Foucault and Edward Said claimed that scientific institutions like clinics and universities are not pursuing timeless and objective truths but are instead using power to determine what counts as truth, in the service of capitalist and colonialist elites. These radical critiques occasionally went as far as arguing that “scientific facts” are nothing more than a capitalist or colonialist “discourse” and that people in power can never be really interested in truth and can never be trusted to recognize and correct their own mistakes.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Not arguing with you per-se, but…. The sky is also yellow, red, and purple in the mornings and evenings. It is also gray when there are storms, and black at night. Covid kills people, but is it a lot? Or a little? Many things kill people, but I don’t get worried about lightning or sharks. Some people do. Relative to those, how dangerous is it? Coal emits co2, but why should I care?
  - beau_g 2y ago
    What would your feelings be on a news outlet called "Public Health Watch" publishing 250 well researched, factually verified articles on dangers of wearing masks long term from 2020-2021 and zero articles on COVID mortality? How about a source called "Atmosphere Guardian" publishing hundreds of factual articles on pollution from solar panel production and li-on battery recycling while publishing zero on coal? The curation and focus of news sources can do a lot to not be impartial even when only dealing in factual information.
- wisty 2y ago
  Impartiality is a process to get closer to the truth. If something is contested, then seek statements from both sides. Trust that eventually the audience will figure it out, and things will eventually no longer be contested (beyond some "lizardman constant" that is ignored - you don't need to seek views that are totally insignificant). The alternative is that people decide the other side is "false news" and now everyone drifts into polarised bubbles.
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    And what if a side is false news? There is news reported from both CNN and Fox that has been completely false. It would not be impartial to let them lie in an effort to get to the truth. You would have to correct them, at which point someone is going to call you partial. Journalism is about actively finding the truth, but you can see in this thread, people's idea of impartiality is letting everyone talk and shrugging.
- felipeerias 2y ago
  The status that journalism still enjoys comes from providing an impartial and objective account of reality. A journalism that openly becomes just another form of political activism will lose what is left of that status. Why should someone listen to a journalist instead of to a random guy on social media, if neither of them is striving to be impartial and reliable?
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    This is a question that presupposes there are any impartial journalists. That is the point. I understand everyone thinks the news they listen to is impartial.
MBCook 2y ago
But how do we define/measure impartiality without reference to the Overton window?
- lazide 2y ago
  Besides this issue, there is also the issue of who pays for it, and how are they paid?
- beau_g 2y ago
  Do you mean for the framing of a piece, or the decision on what to report and to which degree/frequency? The former is more simple - 1. HORRIBLE MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (partial, even though it's within todays overton window) 2. FINALLY, AWESOME MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (partial, outside the overton window) 3. MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (impartial reporting) Headline is obviously far more simple though, removing most adjectives does most of the job, and goes a long way in the content itself as well. Something like choosing which photos to run or editing of video clips would be a lot harder to quantify impartiality/bias, both measuring and for the person doing it I think. As for overall article frequency and depth of article per subject, I think that's where your Overton window question becomes far more difficult - you could quantify a given piece or source against all other news sources and find the edges and the median, but yeah, in most cases just everything is biased by the window at the macro level. You could go back in time and find the dead center median bias media source publishing glowing reports on bloodletting and public executions.
  - weregiraffe 2y ago
    And all the while there's NO genocide in Springfield....
- pchangr 2y ago
  You can define it in terms of language as such “whether the journalist uses rhetorical artifacts that distort the information to support his opinion, or not.” (1) More definitions and discussions can be found in the paper. 1. Francisco-Javier Rodrigo-Ginés, Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz, Laura Plaza, A systematic review on media bias detection: What is media bias, how it is expressed, and how to detect it, Expert Systems with Applications, Volume 237, Part C, 2024, 121641, ISSN 0957-4174, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121641 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121641. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0957417423021437 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095741742...)
Conscat 2y ago
In the anglosphere, we live in a time when minorities are aggressively persecuted by world governments and a sizable portion of their population. Now isn't really the time for moralizing about impartiality in how this is communicated.
ElevenLathe 2y ago
I happen to disagree with you here, but ironically therefore am suspicious of this "finding". It seems to both tell us that impartiality is contextual and relative, but also that it objectively exists and can be measured. The whole thing in incoherent. I think the bigger problem with our information diet is that we're constantly exposed to grade school level analysis that any twentieth century newspaper editor would have laughed out of the newsroom, whether they worked for the Wall Street Journal or Pravda. I'm ok with far right and far left rags sharing newsstand space (metaphorically) with establishment mainstream papers, but in 2025 very little of what we read is fit to be in a proper newspaper, including most of the stuff that actually is. Instead we get sloppy analysis like this that polarizes without illuminating anything. Even a committed Nazi can read The Nation and actually learn something. The same is not true of a committed Marxist reading the average right wing Substack.
malfist 2y ago
I'm not sure impartiality is actually all that great. At least the way it's currently done. Look at Elon's sieg heil during the inauguration. "Impartial" journalism referred to it as an "awkward hand gesture" or just talked about the controversy it caused. Very, very few journalist called a spade a spade, because that's taking a side.

taeric 2y ago

This is one I find less than surprising. At least, less surprising than the lead in implies. Would be like asking who wants news on the cutting edge of sports, versus who wants to know how their preferred team is doing. Now, we like to think people used to be more aligned on the idea of the nation. Or general well being of the world. I am not too shocked to see that people have aligned with cohorts based on perceived identities. Even if I find it disheartening.

ternaryoperator 2y ago
Clay Johnson's 2012 book, The Information Diet, discusses this phenomenon in the context of CNN going from a prime place in the news firmament to an also-ran when TV stations started driving news based on primary on their audience's political preferences. For a while, CNN still enjoyed a place as a definitive source whenever big events happened (national elections, disasters, etc.). But even that role was later subsumed by the biased TV sources. In addition to viewer's preferences for their political slant on the news, I think that when CNN gave up the 24-hour Headline News, that probably diminished their role as well.
- sorcerer-mar 2y ago
  It is totally worth reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death for a (quite depressing) macro picture theory of this evolution and its consequences on our collective ability to reason about the world.
  - ternaryoperator 2y ago
    Quite agreed. It's an extraordinary book that's far more relevant than Postman could ever have imagined.

ranger_danger 2y ago

[flagged]

zabzonk 2y ago
> would it not be better to look at news from all perspectives Probably, but who has the time or the news resources?

riknos314 2y ago

For me, impartiality is the wrong goal for a primary news source. I want as close to the truth as is possible, with as little influence of the publication as possible. I want to have the option to take the in raw facts and contextualize them myself before I engage with external contexts. Due to this, I've been quite a fan of the forbes YouTube channel of late. They've been uploading unedited clips of events with zero spin, commentary, or contextualization.

sodapopcan 2y ago
Unfortunately… and I say this as someone who is prone to this… the vast majority of people (voters) need and/or want EVERYTHING summarized/explained for them.
- mkoubaa 2y ago
  I agree, but those of us who do not want to outsource our thinking to someone else want nothing more than information.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
The great steve Ballmer also runs a just the facts YouTube channel which I found quite good.

wiseowise 2y ago

[flagged]

paulpauper 2y ago

i think the author confuses news with op-ed. If there is a breaking story, I want to know what is going on, but for opinions, ppl generally want their biases or worldviews confirmed.

somenameforme 2y ago

The headline is false. As per the data from the article itself, only 24% of Americans preferred partial or biased media. The overwhelming majority of people without power prefer impartial media. It just happens that of the relatively small percent of people that prefer partial or biased media, it's mostly made up of people with "no power." But even that is also dubious to plainly false since the article's definition of "no power" is very weird and includes anybody who is "ideologically or politically engaged", which is essentially every single person at the highest levels of power in the country.

dmix 2y ago
It's also arguable whether or not the list of people who prefer that sort of media "don't have power". It is defined in the article as: > (a) the ideological and politically engaged; (b) young people, especially those who rely mainly on social media for news; (c) women; and (d) less socioeconomically advantaged groups. People in all of these groups can still have varying forms of power and influence in society. Politically, culturally, or economically. This is borderline clickbait, which is sad because I like neimanlabs.
- staticautomatic 2y ago
  What's at issue is not really whether they have power. It's whether they feel like they have power.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    But then it becomes even weirder, because what percent of all people feel like they have "power"? Excepting an utterly negligible percent of people, I'd think somebody was bordering on megalomania (or an abundance of naivete) if he said he did.

sfink 2y ago

"Impartial" to me implies avoiding any slant, and omitting anything that is biased in any particular direction. I don't think I want that. At least, not anymore; I used to consume lots of science-related news that would probably fit in that category. But for most things, I don't want to avoid hearing whatever the "sides" have to say -- I want to hear from every perspective. Sure, I don't want to hear from the extremes, because they aren't going to contain much information. It's all "See?! This proves that [preconceived notion is true]!" bullshit. I'm going to promote my preferred news source Tangle: https://www.readtangle.com/?ref=tangle-newsletter https://www.readtangle.com/?ref=tangle-newsletter It's US-centric and just talks about "left" vs "right". But then, that's all we really have left in this country anyway. It talks about a single topic each day, has quotes that tell you what each side is saying, and then some analysis and opinion that you may or may not agree with, but at least you'll have some sense of the space in which to think. I am certainly partisan and favor one side, but I will often find some sense in what the other side is saying, and likewise I will often find that many on "my" side are full of crap with respect to some particular issue. It's a good way to add nuance to one's own perspective on things, and to consider deeper questions than you would by constantly trying to justify your side's take on anything and everything. tl;dr: "all sides" news > "no sides" news

mkoubaa 2y ago

As long as they peddle "stories", they are not impartial. As long as they explain what happened, they are not impartial. I want information. I want it to look like this: Reporter X has information from Individual Y in the newsroom that the organization Z says, "direct quote". Then I want to mercilessly cull any entity in all chaina that has been shown to be misleading. I mean until the end of time. And I want this to be done algorithmically.

Apreche 2y ago

The seems to define impartial news as news that has no particular point of view. What does that mean to not have a point of view? Any news source is disseminating information. This always carries the point of view that the information being disseminated is factual. If we’re talking about pure opinions, like movie reviews, I would argue that isn’t news. Many people seem to think that impartial news is news that covers all sides. They share all purported and contradictory information from all sources without confirming which information is true, and which is not. This allows the audience to decide for themselves how to see the world rather than being forced to see the world as it is. The upside is not being forced to see only a false world as envisioned by others who may have unseemly motives. The downside is many are left confused and unsure what is true. This defeats the purpose of news entirely, as the audience is just as uninformed after reading as they were before. The only truly impartial news source is one that will adhere to rigorous standards of evidence. Given all the available information they will take a firm stand in declaring what the facts are, and to what degree of certainty. The problem is that in a world with vaccine deniers, climate denial, etc. a purely fact-based and impartial source of news would be branded as very extremist.

freen 2y ago
[flagged]
- ryandv 2y ago
  [flagged]
- weregiraffe 2y ago
  And people dislike biases, which is why reality can't win elections...
- tomhow 2y ago
  Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
2y ago

ryandv 2y ago

> News outlets exist, in one sense at least, to serve their audiences. But they also exist to serve their advertisers. And their journalists exist in an uneasy symbiosis with a community’s institutions — government, police, schools, business, civil society — which are the subject of much of their work. Does “impartial” news represent a purity of audience service? Or some triangulation of all the various power sources and elite stakeholders that interact with it? Not a new idea. Chomsky & Herman talked about the incident forces and special interests that act upon the government/media/advertising complex and the degree to which these forces influenced the content of mass media and television in the 80s in their book Manufacturing Consent. Similar considerations apply in the age of social media today.

lyu07282 2y ago

The whole idea that there is such a thing as impartial or unbiased news is a deeply flawed idea that is itself a strong ideological position. Everyone is biased, ideological and partial, some may claim they aren't, but it's just a lie. The media has failed everyone miserably over and over and over again in the last decades and has consistently failed to take accountability. I still vividly remember the media's disgusting mouth-foaming psychotic hysteria in support of the Iraq war and the ferociousness in which they barked at anyone who dares to speak the truth. Or the countless times they prevented leaks of the most disgusting crimes of the state to be published, or how they threw their own sources into the fire to protect the most vile warmongers. I feel nothing but contempt for journalism.

lazide 2y ago
The challenge here is, what is the alternative?

beloch 2y ago

In recent years, I've come to appreciate "Talking Head" panel discussions when it comes to topics of great partiality, such as politics. Specifically, those that gather heads with differing opinions. e.g. CBC Canada's "Power & Politics" panels. If you take people from opposite ends of the spectrum and put them in a well moderated environment, the discussion that results often helps you to appreciate the different angles that people approach political issues from. Aside from in the U.S. during recent years, political issues are usually a matter of perspective and shades of grey. i.e. If there is a black and white scientific consensus on a given topic, it rarely becomes a political topic (except recently in the U.S.). It's when people with different opinions explain their position and try to sway each other that you're most likely to see arguments that actually have some merit. Even if you are not swayed by an argument, at least you can get a sense of why somebody with a different perspective sees the issue that way. Unfortunately, at lot of people, and I'll leave it up to others to speculate on who those predominantly are, are not curious about or interested in views that don't align with their own. They may perceive exposure to such views as aggression. i.e. If you express a view they don't agree with, they may see it as an attempt to force them to align with that view. This perception of persuasion as aggression may explain why some scientifically black and white issues have become political.

giantg2 2y ago
"If there is a black and white scientific consensus on a given topic, it rarely becomes a political topic" Science is one thing. How to implement that in policy is a different thing, and often is political.
ryandv 2y ago
This sounds like a reprisal of the common far right bigoted refrain to platform "both sides" when we all know that reality obviously has a liberal bias [0]. This dog whistle for free speech was also used by John Stuart Mill, an influential figure in classical liberalism, the movement that provided the ideological roots of the modern alt-right extremist movement, in his treatise On Liberty from 1859 [1]: It is also often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practise. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43628756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43628756 [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm

travisjungroth 2y ago

Critically, this is a stated versus a revealed preference. All these surveys tell you is that people in these groups are less likely to have a self image of valuing impartial news. It doesn’t tell you about their actual habits.

staticautomatic 2y ago
While this is generally true, people do actually tend to consume media that comports with their existing or desired self-image. Source: I run insights & analytics for a media company.

neo1250 2y ago

Do we have any documentation of the "revealed preferences" of the major news publications today? You would imagine that this bias/preference is readily available for internal (national) news outlets just like they are for international news sources. So many employees of these major news outlets have spoken up on the recent forced biased coverage in politics, war-time, conflicts etc. It would be nice to have a live cheatsheet to refer to any active biases being introduced by these major news outlets (and possibly linking their editorial/ownership relationships as well)

SanjayMehta 2y ago
Ashley Rindsberg discusses NYT in his book “The Gray Lady Winked.”

ragtagtag 2y ago

This is one area where richer countries can learn a lot from poorer countries, should they choose to listen. When I lived in Liberia, there were about 10-15 different newspapers in the capital, from websites to print to one guy with a massive chalk board on the main road. This diversity of sources served quite a small population, but there was a massive appetite for news. In such a situation, you don't expect impartiality, but each news organisation's perspective sites is more obvious, and reading about events from multiple perspectives gives, in my view, a broader and clearer window into what happened. I think it could make sense to value in news, not impartiality, but diversity of viewpoints. Conveniently, the internet does make this much easier.

giantg2 2y ago
Alomg those same lines, even if something is considered impartial, we would need to gather multiple viewpoints to fact check that it actually is impartial.

ConspiracyFact 2y ago

>People belonging to socially disadvantaged groups, such as women When can we stop with this?

IAmGraydon 2y ago

Couldn't we have done without the double negative and had a simpler and more effective headline?

randcraw 2y ago

It's likely that the people who like impartial news the least are those who want a reporter to digest the raw data for them and then summarize it. They don't want to have to hunt and gather raw news from multiple sources or filter out logical inconsistencies or unreliable data. They want a message that has been simplified, made palatable. They want someone else to do the analytical heavy lifting for them. I suspect most of us also want news that doesn't make us think too hard. Don't take me out of my comfort zone, or challenge my presumptions and preferences. No surprises, please. Allow me to remain confident that my beliefs need no revision and my 'bubble' can remain unpunctured. Alternately, I would have thought that a better measure of impartiality would be personal curiosity -- the desire to learn what you don't know and correct your misunderstandings, and the quest for news that ensues.

baazaa 2y ago

Or in other words dumb people are less impacted by social desirability bias when responding to the survey because they don't realise that 'impartiality' is something to be desired. As for why impartial news does so poorly in practice, it's often because it's utterly uninformative. 'Car bomb goes off in Kabul' is worthless info to 100% of the population, whereas the moment you try to contextualise it 'Car bomb goes off in Kabul, which is becoming more frequent, which suggests administration is lying about how well the occupation is going' then you're no longer impartial. Journalists and editors have spent the better part of a century stripping all useful information out of their articles in an effort to be impartial. It would be much better if they instead aimed for a diversity of opinions than a mythical objectivity devoid of ideological bias.

dsign 2y ago

"Impartial news"? Here is a fringe position of mine which I'll be happy for you to turn to shreds, or at least illuminate: rational consensus is being stabbed to death. If we are to live in democracy, we need consensus to be able to do important things. Without those important things, "bad things" happen. Say, you don't get medical care. Or a pandemic of a preventable disease kills a lot of people who don't have access to a vaccine or who don't want to be vaccinated. Here, you may say, "hey, my definition of bad thing is different than yours. Who are you to decide?". And now you are starting to see the problem. So, we need consensus. And a good way to reach consensus is for people to have access to facts and to be able to make sense of those facts. But in an increasingly complicated world, both things are very difficult. Making sense of facts requires advanced mental tools: previous knowledge, reading skills, mathematics and logic. Those skills are under siege by forces that compete to engage people with dopamine-inducing content: social media, cable-news, video-games, politicians in campaign trails, etc. You as an individual may perhaps have enough reason, but at a group level, the critical mass for rational consensus is not there. The endgame of that train is lack of social trust and anarchy. But "fortunately", before getting there, people turn to strong figures and/or to violent ideologies that suppress the "other". The worst part is that I don't think there is a democracy-preserving solution to this problem, at least not for societies which are already incapable of reaching rational consensus. USA should prepare for its age of stabby emperors[^1]. [^1]: Please don't take this last statement seriously, I'm just goading you with dopamine-inducing content.

JadoJodo 2y ago

I don’t mind partial news. What I _do_ mind is partial news that _masquerades_ as impartial news. I will happily read a well written piece authored by someone with whom I may or may not disagree who is up front about their bend. But when you’re telling me that this policy is Donald Trump playing 4D chess or that Joe Biden is the sharpest he’s ever been, and follow it up with some variation of “I’m a[n unbiased] journalist”, I’m out.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

Honestly I could do without any news at all! My father is profoundly addicted to consuming news media in every form possible. Never a day went by in my childhood without him hiding behind the daily newspaper (and then relating back all he read) and tuning in to every news on every TV channel. It was single-minded and exhausting, even compared to my own voracious and indiscriminate addiction. I’ve never wanted to hear irrelevant shitty news stories. They are all 100% geopolitical gossip and only designed to control us, pacify us and/or engender F.U.D., and also to sell advertising. News media has nearly nothing to do with what an urban human needs to get by in daily life. The days that pass without me being lured in to some shitty RSS feed of clickbait, those are good days. I prefer to go to primary sources today so I simply keep open a tab on weather.gov, Google Maps for traffic or transit schedules, and YT channels from the Holy See & the People’s House for ceremonies and press briefings. Also the Wikipedia Main Page keeps me informed about the latest global obituaries and really big deals. People are being led around by the nose by shitty 24/7 news cycles that consist 99% in stuff that’s bread & circuses. Living our lives should never depend on what’s on TV.

esbranson 2y ago

I am a Wikipedian who edits on government and law, and no, neither NPR nor PBS (WETA) NewsHour are anywhere near impartial. The notion that left-of-center consumers have impartial news is laughable. The US does not have a BBC.