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What the author presents as "sincerity" comes off as injecting (his) biased views into reporting. The post devolves into a tedious series of anecdotes that oste

What the author presents as "sincerity" comes off as injecting (his) biased views into reporting. The post devolves into a tedious series of anecdotes that ostensibly prove that "context" can reframe a story, and he argues that sincere reporting should take that context into account, which is reasonable in principle, but he doesn't seem to realize that he's only presenting context that suits his worldview and tosses out the rest. For example, he decries journalists being wrong or underemphasizing his bias by failing to account for data that proves him right in retrospect. In the same paragraph, he smears reporters for under-weighing and over-weighing soft data. That's easy to do in hindsight. My takeaway is that he undermines his own premise by demonstrating everything that can go wrong in opinionated reporting: cherry-picking, double standards, and confirmation bias. P.S.: the most surprising thing to me about this blog post is that it went through an editor.

jszymborski 1y ago
> comes off as injecting (his) biased views into reporting The trouble is that not adding context is also a choice, which also reveals an authors belief on the topic, except with sufficient plausible deniability. This is why the article describes it as cowardly. It isn't sufficient to defer to people in positions in power. You may appear to be neutral to those who don't bother to think about it, but in truth you're just adopting the position of the person whose anecdata you've unthinkingly regurgitated. The job of a journalist is to think, apply rigorous thought, do research, challenge the status quo. There is no "unbiased" media, just sincere and insincere. Good will arguments and bad will arguments. We all perceive the world some way, and it isn't always how other people perceive it. What one calls boss-coddling, another might call common sense business. As long as you do your homework, "stand on your shit", and don't just remasticate the pablum handed to you from on high, we'll be fine. Sadly, as pointed out in the article, we're sorta drowning in soggy pablum these days.
- bananalychee 1y ago
  Dispensing from editorialism is a choice, yes, but that only translates to bias if it's done inconsistently. Meanwhile, while contextualizing, and to a greater extent reframing, can also be done in a fair and objective manner, doing it well and consistently is much more difficult. I don't think that Zitron cares about objectivity nearly as much as he cares about his worldview being validated by reporters, thus the idea that failing to inject context [which promotes that worldview] is inherently insincere. Since journalism is a fairly ideologically homogeneous profession, I can understand how that might appeal to him, but I doubt he'd make that argument from the other side of the fence.

jszymborski 1y ago

> comes off as injecting (his) biased views into reporting The trouble is that not adding context is also a choice, which also reveals an authors belief on the topic, except with sufficient plausible deniability. This is why the article describes it as cowardly. It isn't sufficient to defer to people in positions in power. You may appear to be neutral to those who don't bother to think about it, but in truth you're just adopting the position of the person whose anecdata you've unthinkingly regurgitated. The job of a journalist is to think, apply rigorous thought, do research, challenge the status quo. There is no "unbiased" media, just sincere and insincere. Good will arguments and bad will arguments. We all perceive the world some way, and it isn't always how other people perceive it. What one calls boss-coddling, another might call common sense business. As long as you do your homework, "stand on your shit", and don't just remasticate the pablum handed to you from on high, we'll be fine. Sadly, as pointed out in the article, we're sorta drowning in soggy pablum these days.

bananalychee 1y ago
Dispensing from editorialism is a choice, yes, but that only translates to bias if it's done inconsistently. Meanwhile, while contextualizing, and to a greater extent reframing, can also be done in a fair and objective manner, doing it well and consistently is much more difficult. I don't think that Zitron cares about objectivity nearly as much as he cares about his worldview being validated by reporters, thus the idea that failing to inject context [which promotes that worldview] is inherently insincere. Since journalism is a fairly ideologically homogeneous profession, I can understand how that might appeal to him, but I doubt he'd make that argument from the other side of the fence.