Unbiased reporting raises no hackles and is considered too bland. It's all about confirmation bias these days. A couple of years ago I thought NPR was even minded - then they began supporting wokeness and the 1619 Project. Some here may think that is no argument against unbiased reporting, but it is, just to the left and not the right.

Disinformation, whether from the media or social sites, is the number one threat to this nation.

Besides confirmation bias, I'd argue viewers desire biased reporting and see it as not only morally justified but as a moral imperative, and this is true all across the political spectrum. Responsible reporting takes into consideration the social & political impacts of their coverage and is expected to act accordingly. This was always true, but there are many political views being represented here that directly oppose each other on almost every issue, so you get stark contrasts in the biases that make them stunningly apparent.

There's no possibility of unbiased reporting, the question is what kind of biases are desirable and which aren't? Though it's important to note that "unbiased reporting" might refer to an intent and legitimate effort to report the facts accurately and impartially, rather than being literally free of bias.

If all reporting is biased, does this mean that all reporting is equally biased? — hypericin

No, all reporting is variably biased, and we can not immediately be sure how.

We do not/can not see the world "as it is". We always have a POV; we are all subject to at least several of the numerous cognitive biases available; we always have our own histories; we are always influenced by others' reports--and so on. Further, the receiver of reportage is also biased in several ways.

Do our deficiencies mean that there is no "truth" in reporting?

Something approximating "The Truth" has to be extracted from the information available to us. The news media are variable, but are generally consistent in their bias. Fox News won't sound like NPR. The New York Times won't sound like Epoch Times. On important topics (like global heating, climate change, fossil fuels, etc.) one has to dig deeper, adding books, web sites, magazine articles, and the like. Reflection and discussion are essential. (Given that we have lives to lead, only a few topics can be subject to intensive consideration.)

So, one compares and contrasts; looks for bias; is on guard for major inconsistencies; checks multiple resources; and so on. Eventually one settles on what feels like a reliable version. The reliable version may stand up over time, or fall apart.

I thought NPR was even minded - then they began supporting wokeness — jgill

NPR isn't what it used to be; the same goes for some other public TV / public radio / public media operations. What was the cause? Changes in management; changes in funding levels and funding sources; herd-movements among media operations of all kinds; etc. The 1619 project started in 2019; a year or so later there was George Floyd's death (and several others) and the ensuing riots. The media, managed and staffed by a lot of white people (especially those "white men") seemed to have a crisis of "white guilt" that required compensatory changes in how and what was reported.

An example: Minnesota Public Radio's music programmers suddenly woke to a previously unmet need to program and promote black classical composers and musicians. Suddenly Florence Price (died in 1953) was hot. She's a worthwhile composer, certainly. The quality of the music they added to the repertoire isn't in question. It's the obvious and PR loaded reasons for the change. their 'racist guilt'.

Or that there is some irreducible level of bias which cannot be eliminated? — hypericin

Under the assumption of any form of report by an individual subject, cognitive prejudice is an irreducible level of bias which cannot be eliminated. But its conflicts can be recognized and subsequently guarded against.

NPR isn't what it used to be — BC

It's really not. I've been disappointed in what they believe is newsworthy and in the great efforts they make to show their alignment with various causes. I also don't think their reporting is always in good faith. As an example, my son went to college in the inner city and the area was gentrifying, with his low income apartment on the chopping block. NPR came out and interviewed him assuming he was a local resident and not a suburban student transplant. He explained that he felt that if low income housing were mandated, the cost burden would shift to him to make it sustainable, and that he would expect to pay more for where he would eventually live. You may disagree with his analysis, but the way they hacked his quote up, you'd have thought he was Bernie Sanders, sorely upset with the capitalistic system and mistreatment of the poor.

In any event, I take the position that objectivity is an impossible standard, and not even one worth pretending to advance. We all have some perspective and point of view and those biases are inevitable. I think the better practice is to try and be balanced, which means offering competing perspectives without favor toward one or the other. That is a difficult task given the consumer driven market, meaning one shops for news at the place where they expect to get the news they want.

The solution then for those who are looking for balance would realistically be to look at various news outlets, meaning if you want a real perspective, first go to Fox, then make your way over to CNN. That approach might be a good one, but the likely result is that you'll settle on the one where your preference lies. There's no reason to keep trying the competitor's burgers once you've figured out what you like.

It was a publisher who coined the phrase “without fear or favor.” That publisher was Adolph Ochs, who promised readers when he acquired The New York Times in 1896, that it would be his “earnest aim to … give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interest involved. — Google

The good old days, when Adolph was just a name.

But its conflicts can be recognized and subsequently guarded against. — Mww

And it comes down, pretty much to who does one fear to displease and who does one desire to favour?
On the fear side one can be sure that it is power that will induce fear, the power of the rich, and the high status, or the power of the masses. and on the favour side, it will be 'people like us' that will be favoured.

It is a fine ideal, that requires one to be honest with oneself about ones' motivations, but modern reporting is inclined to be motivated most of all by fear of appearing biased, which results in a feeble minded addiction to a notion of 'balance' that negates everything said with its opposite. The result is an equalisation of fact and fiction - Round Earth and Flat Earth, Climate change and its denial, etc.

It is a fine ideal, that requires one to be honest with oneself about ones' motivations, but modern reporting is inclined to be motivated most of all by fear of appearing biased — unenlightened

Agreed. Fear of appearing biased is almost worse that actually being so. Peer pressure, job security and the like overriding intrinsic personality.

The bias, background, politics, wealth, or any other factor of a reporter or news outlet doesn’t matter. To say otherwise is the genetic fallacy. Even the National Enquirer can break news.

It matters whether it is true or false; it matters if it contains all relevant information or lies by omission; it matters if it is pertinent or a waste of time.

It's the obvious and PR loaded reasons for the change. their 'racist guilt'. — BC

Isn't it possible they want to highlight historically underrepresented groups and correct an unfairness that has been the status quo for a very long time?

The bias, background, politics, wealth, or any other factor of a reporter or news outlet doesn’t matter. To say otherwise is the genetic fallacy. — NOS4A2

Paying attention to genesis ends up in fallacy if one
makes the wrong connection between an organizing bias and news content. But there is no news without bias.

If all reporting is biased, does this mean that all reporting is equally biased? — hypericin

All reporting comes from a point of view - some more so than others. If we are fortunate, it is the point of view of the robust journalist who may work hard to be fair in the reporting. Or, less auspiciously, it may be reporting paid for by a media owner, with a vested interest in describing a particular account of the world. But all reporting is in the business of selecting and highlighting that which the reporter (or news service) believes is important - to imagine that this can be value free would be unrealistic.

Yes, it's possible they want to highlight historically underrepresented groups and correct an unfairness that has been the status quo for a very long time. I'm sure some staff within the public media organizations would like to do that.

What makes me doubt that this is a deep commitment is the "bandwagon effect" in which an about-face occurred in all sorts of organizations at pretty much the same time. Highlighting historically unrepresented groups was suddenly de rigueur; it was "trending". Time will tell how long this new-found virtue will last.

Then there are the groups that remain in the pre-woke shadows, like working class white men--a group that has historically been discounted. The plight of workers in general isn't prominent, and it will probably be a cold day in hell before public media gives extended attention to the exploitation of the working class by the predatory rich. One rarely hears much about the history of organized labor, unions, unionization, or corporate and legislative efforts to block unionization. The increased immiseration of large parts of the working class--and its class-related cause--is another neglected topi that affects working men, women, blacks, whites, latinos, and asians.

The plight of workers in general isn't prominent, and it will probably be a cold day in hell before public media gives extended attention to the exploitation of the working class by the predatory rich. One rarely hears much about the history of organized labor, unions, unionization, or corporate and legislative efforts to block unionization. The increased immiseration of large parts of the working class--and its class-related cause--is another neglected topi that affects working men, women, blacks, whites, latinos, and asians. — BC

:up: That's for sure.

Then there are the groups that remain in the pre-woke shadows, like working class white men--a group that has historically been discounted. The plight of workers in general isn't prominent, and it will probably be a cold day in hell before public media gives extended attention to the exploitation of the working class by the predatory rich. One rarely hears much about the history of organized labor, unions, unionization, or corporate and legislative efforts to block unionization. — BC

I can't back up what I'm saying with stats, but my impression of NPR from listening to it while driving home is that they have given quite a bit of airtime to efforts to unionize Amazon "fulfilment" centers and Starbucks. NPR also covers the opioid crisis more than the other liberal news outlets, imo.

I pretty much listen to public radio, whether it's NPR, the BBC or the local service. I don't watch TV. Can't comment much on broadcast liberal news outlets. The New York Times is a liberal news source, more or less.

"Deaths of despair" and opioids do get more mention on NPR than some other media, just guessing. What media in general are reluctant to do is get specific about how the despairing dead were driven to their graves over an extended period of time -- cutting costs by exporting production overseas; destroying the labor that gave these men and their families a half ways decent life; cutting social services of all kinds in neoliberal drives to "get government off our backs"; dismissing these people as "deplorable", and so on.

Immiseration doesn't happen all by itself; neither does huge accumulations of wealth. There is a causal relationship between despair at the bottom and greed at the top. It's obvious; report on it.

Yes, there are efforts to organize Amazon and Starbucks. Both corporations are vigorously opposing unionization and the successes have been pretty limited. According to NPR, "Since then [the organization drive at a Staten Island facility], though, the Amazon Labor Union has gained little ground. It has yet to win another union election. And Amazon still refuses to sit down for contract negotiations." March, 2023

More Starbuck locations have been organized, but according to Wikipedia, "As of June 2023, over 8,000 workers at over 331 Starbucks stores in at least 40 states in the United States have voted to unionize, primarily with Workers United. As of March 2023 none have yet enacted a collective bargaining agreement.

Starbucks Corp. also strongly resists unionization. So, good to talk about this little success story.

The Service Employees International Union has had more success organizing office cleaners and the like -- 2,000,000 members strong.

ProPublica has had pretty good coverage of wage theft and labor issues in general. Their finding that US employers steal more money from employees each year by not paying them for hours worked or for legally required overtime than the combined value of all the thefts and robberies in the country each year made the rounds on NPR and the larger papers.

https://www.propublica.org/topics/labor

The problem is that this sort of coverage just gets slammed as "left-wing propaganda." And, to be fair, I have also seen interest pieces about the sturggles of buisness owners that seem to have real merit slammed as "right-wing propaganda," as well, although less often.

Actually, government reporting, for example the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, tends to put out some of the best stuff. CFPB had a whole big thing on hidden fees and dishonest pricing showing that the median American household pays a quite meaningful amount of their entire income to companies who have tricked them into giving the company their financial information so that company can essentially steal from the family, taking their money in "exchange" for goods they had no intent to buy or marking the price of a service up by over 100% with hidden fees.

It always cracks me up how American culture basically teaches you that it's your responsibility to not allow large companies to steal from you. Just one example of a good report I've seen from the Feds recently. I think the vast majority of the public hates this behavior, which is endemic, and would love to see something done about it. The problem is that media companies themselves use these practices...



They aren't all on the same level. The argument that they are is also self-undermining. If I believe everything I read is as biased as North Korean state media, why should I believe a person when they say that everything is that biased? And why bracket it to the amorphous category of "journalism." Scientific journals wield plenty of influence, and they are influenced by politics, so shouldn't we include them too? Yet, I wouldn't put flat earth websites on a level with geology textbooks.

Some outlets allow more editorialization in their news than others. Some allow a wider selection of voices in their editorial spaces than others. For example, back when Tom Ashbrook led NPR's "On Point," he used to have people from conservative think tanks (e.g., CATO, AEI, etc.) probably more often than liberals (although he often paired them together). Outlets can also be very biased in what they cover, even if the coverage of what they do cover meets some standards of rigor. It's a gradation.

A lot is done to muddy the waters, but there is indeed a stark difference between real journalistic enterprises and those, often state run (or those run at a loss by the very wealthy), that are run solely in order to advance the interests of a single group, and which have no qualms with simply making up and publishing falsehoods.

The waters just get intentionally muddied by propagandists. If you can't make yourself more credible, it helps to just make everyone else less credible.


There are also many different kinds of bias. People tend to think of the big picture "left vs right," divide, but in different sub-areas there are all sorts of different splits that can become very heated and lead to bias in coverage. For example, there are allegations of academic reporting bias in niche publications over language acquisition methods, or there used to be a good deal of bias and censorship vis-a-vis alternative theories in quantum foundations until the late-90s. These are real divisions that lead to censorship and bias, but the left-right divide doesn't map to them at all as they tend not to be politically salient arguments. That doesn't stop people from being fanatic about them though (e.g., people losing their shit over "whole language" vs "phonics," when it seems fairly obvious to most people that kids learn to read using both).

Bias is not always bad.

A woman talking about women’s experiences is certainly biased … but that is what we need to move towards an actual understanding. A man talking about women’s experiences is biased too. They are potentially both just as bias as each other here depending upon the context of the discussion of women’s experiences.

Needless to say I think women can offer more about the experiences of women than men ;)

Point being … why would anyone seek to eliminate bias? If possible this would make the item useless/unintelligible I feel.

In any event, I take the position that objectivity is an impossible standard, and not even one worth pretending to advance. We all have some perspective and point of view and those biases are inevitable. I think the better practice is to try and be balanced, which means offering competing perspectives without favor toward one or the other. — Hanover

It's hard to disagree with that, but let me try. :razz: I should begin by saying that I think all of the recent attempts at "objective news" have failed, and that a competing-perspectives approach like theflipside.io is currently the best option. So your claim is empirically verified, but...

Even if objectivity is an impossible standard, I would say that it is still worth aiming at, and that it is worth aiming at in a very focused and effortful manner. First I would suggest that some events are objectively news-worthy, e.g. "A hurricane hit Florida." There are also objective ways to report such an event, like reporting the magnitude of the hurricane, the locations affected, the damage and harm incurred, and the aid strategies being carried out. Although we all know that hurricanes can be politicized, I think it is plausible that hurricanes are not inherently political or partisan events.

But what would it mean to be objective in the case of more complex, non-natural events? In that case I think objectivity is the telos of the competing-perspectives approach. If this is right and the competing-perspectives approach is, in part, a means to objectivity, then it cannot function as a replacement for objectivity. If a competing-perspectives approach were a mining operation, then objectivity would be the gold that is ultimately mined, and it would not make sense to prefer the mining to the gold.

On this model, then, objectivity is the neutral ground which lies between biased partisanship. For example, if the left has a selection bias in favor of black deaths and the right has a selection bias in favor of police deaths then objectivity with respect to any relevant events involves reporting which balances both of these biases, grounding itself in facts rather than interpretation (so far as this is possible).* I think this is what a competing-perspectives approach seeks to access: the ground-level events, unadulterated by partisan hijacking.

The notion of objectivity is particularly important because the need for objectivity will correlate to an issue's "political charge." The most politically charged issues will demand the most objectivity, and the least politically charged issues will require the least objectivity. What I mean by this is that the degree of intent and effort required in order to achieve a similar level of objectivity will vary depending on the issue. Given our cultural context, it is harder to objectively report the George Floyd event than it is to objectively report the hurricane event. Similarly, it would be harder to judge the alleged crime of one's child than to judge the alleged crime of a stranger, for where bias is more prevalent, objectivity is more difficult and elusive.


* This balancing cannot be a simple mean between two interpretations lest it succumb to intentional manipulations of the Overton window by one or both sides. It must instead be grounded in a tertium quid, an independent reality.