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> All of which is to say that audience desire for “impartiality” is profoundly contextual — embedded in the particular political, social, and economic environme
by 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 agoThe 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 agoI 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 agoBeing 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 agoNo, 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 agoYou might want to read the parent comment.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- BrenBarn 2y agoMaybe, 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 agoThere 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 agoMaybe 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 agoJournalistic 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 agoIf 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 agoAs 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 agoNot 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 agoWhat 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 agoImpartiality 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 agoAnd 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 agoThe 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 agoThis 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 agoBut how do we define/measure impartiality without reference to the Overton window?
- lazide 2y agoBesides this issue, there is also the issue of who pays for it, and how are they paid?
- beau_g 2y agoDo 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 agoAnd all the while there's NO genocide in Springfield....
- pchangr 2y agoYou 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 agoIn 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 agoI 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 agoI'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.