I don't agree with the notion that news reporting should not strive for objectivity. You ditch that, and then you get propaganda like Fox News in it's place.

Humans can't be objective in the ideal sense, but they can certainly strive for it, which is much better than intentionally trying to persuade the public about a certain ideological outlook.

The difference between imperfect reporting and propaganda is huge and important. Also, there is a very real difference between fake news and real news, even if real news doesn't capture all the facts perfectly.

Even if choosing which news you report is a subjective decision, to simply list shortly what has happened can be objective. If news reports a typhoon hitting Japan, I can be pretty confident that a typhoon is hitting Japan: there will be lots of various newschannels confirming it with a multitude of reporting on the subject.

If people are informed and follow news from various outlets, they can (if they want) notice even the more subtle biases of reporting. And once when you are able to do that, I think it's OK. You can separate facts from the agenda that is pushed. Newspapers and media companies as individual journalists have allways had their point of view, political views they support or reject. It may not be always as evident as in Fox News, but this really shouldn't come as a shocker and make people think that all news is then totally fake, totally loaded with misconceptions and totally untrustworthy.

Even total disinformation to be effective has to connive and enforce existing beliefs that people already have, however crazy they can be.

The problem may be more about the people who simply want to believe in their own views and then pick the news that enforces their views. With social media we can find easily our own echo chambers.

I don't agree with the notion that news reporting should not strive for objectivity. You ditch that, and then you get propaganda like Fox News in it's place. — Marchesk

I'm not sure you are disagreeing with the OP. I don't see what @hypericin is proposing as undercutting norms of trying to avoid political bias or of refraining from lying for the benefit of a hidden agenda. I rather hear him/her as arguing that the process of public news reporting can't, even in principle, be culled from the narratives that motivates the selection of the news items that are being reported as well as the gloss that is put on them.

If news media are going to report on a typhoon hitting Japan (as they often should) isn't this precisely because typhoons hitting densely populated areas fit within significant sorts of narratives on account of their destructive potential? Should news media report all, and only, "events" that result in x+ deaths (for some x)? How are they to individuate discrete events objectively and assess whether or not some events are significant enough to merit reporting merely on the basis of objective factors that don't speak to their relevance for widespread human concerns, and hence relate back to significant narratives?

In your example, it would also be relevant to compare the reporting of this typhoon hitting Japan vs. one with a comparable impact in say the Philippines.

My basic point is, to do "news", you must select facts (or make them up) among the infinite available, and emphasize them. But there can be nothing objective about this, this basic act of telling a story (true story, or not). This is the realm of narrative, not objectivity.

But there can be nothing objective about this, this basic act of telling a story (true story, or not). This is the realm of narrative, not objectivity. — hypericin

That's just going too far. There's nothing subjective about a Typhoon hitting Japan. Of course there is a selection process on what constitutes events worth reporting. And that's what tends to attract viewers. Disasters, conflicts, controversies and scandals are always good bets, because most people who pay attention to general news want to hear that stuff.

This is the realm of narrative, not objectivity. — hypericin

Well, of course, facts need to be structured in order to be communicated coherently, but it's possible to overstate the issue here in terms of a discussion on bias. For a start, news reporting is obviously not purely in the realm of narrative and divorced from objective reality. That would be a better description of fiction (and even then facts usually make up part of the mix). Sometimes, for example, the facts do take centre stage and the narrative is fairly benign and aimed at providing a minimum of structure, so there's no significant bias to be concerned about. In a report on a fire in a major building, the narrative might be nothing more than "fire is a dangerous risk and something we should be concerned with", the facts concerning injuries/fatalities and how the fire started and when etc. taking center stage. Alternatively, the fire may have been caused, as in the Grenfell tower fire disaster, by a chain of irresponsible and self-serving decisions by the authorities, and may have much wider and more important social and political implications. Here narrative (and bias) takes centre stage, and they can serve an important ethical function, i.e. raising awareness of a problem and its causes in order to help prevent it from recurring (as well as, obviously, doing the opposite and obscuring the problem depending on the interest of the news providers).

So, narrative in itself is not always primary in news except in the trivial sense regarding the infinite number of "facts" available to us in any particular situation and the necessity of choosing from them to properly describe any event (i.e. decisions of salience) as per its basic function. And this is just a magnified version of how we talk to each other and communicate generally. We structure our facts into coherent narratives that communicate much more (including about us) than objective reality. So, what's important in my view is the basic recognition that communication, of whatever form, is never entirely neutral. Then you can use that knowledge to examine the inevitable biases at different levels, personal, cultural, political etc. of any given example thereof including news.

But there can be nothing objective about this, this basic act of telling a story (true story, or not). — hypericin

Just to note that from a linguistic perspective, the genre of narrative as story is often defined as being fundamentally different from the genre that covers most news articles (e.g., as per MAK Halliday and SFL, the 'recount' genre). A narrative in this sense that explicitly goes beyond events to tell a particular story has a setting, a protagonist, a building of action, a climax etc. A news text only has to be, (at its most basic) a list of events (though there is potential further structure in terms of how those are listed).

decisions of salience — Baden

What are those?

What do you want me to explain, the definition of 'salience' or the context in which I'm using the phrase?

That's just going too far. There's nothing subjective about a Typhoon hitting Japan. Of course there is a selection process on what constitutes events worth reporting. And that's what tends to attract viewers. Disasters, conflicts, controversies and scandals are always good bets, because most people who pay attention to general news want to hear that stuff. — Marchesk

And what about the typhoons that don't ever make landfall?

What you are pointing out is that any news is made for an audience, which then gets some
utility from following the news. A typhoon that is born and dies in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific isn't something that news agencies will pick up, but surely ships sailing in it's way have a keen interest on the subject. Naturally they just follow weather reports and I assume we agree that there typically isn't a bias or political agenda in marine weather forcasts (of course I can be wrong here).

We structure our facts into coherent narratives that communicate much more (including about us) than objective reality. So, what's important in my view is the basic recognition that communication, of whatever form, is never entirely neutral. — Baden

And that it isn't entirely neutral doesn't mean objectivity, truth or the facts have been totally lost or don't exist at all. That is just something reeking to post-modernism in it's extreme.

And that it isn't entirely neutral doesn't mean objectivity, truth or the facts have been totally lost or don't exist at all. That is just something reeking to post-modernism in it's extreme. — ssu

Sure, that's more or less what I was trying to point out re news.

The context please.

OK, so what I meant with regard to this:

So, narrative in itself is not always primary in news except in the trivial sense regarding the infinite number of "facts" available to us in any particular situation and the necessity of choosing from them to properly describe any event (.i.e. decisions of salience) — Baden

...is that in the trivial sense there is obviously an attempt to assemble facts in a subjective way in order to make a coherent and sensible report of any news event. To take again the example of a fire, one decision of salience might be to report on the flammability of the material the building is made of rather than its colour.

But the claim that:

The insescaple bias in news reporting is due to a simple fact: News never simply presents facts, which can be objective. It always also builds narratives, which are never never objective; never, because they must be built, not observed. — hypericin

Points to something more nefarious above and beyond this simple level of selectivity, and that's absolutely worth looking for in news reporting, but a distinction between levels should be made and the OP as written is too sweeping ('always', 'never' etc.) in its presentation to be of much analytical use.

...is that in the trivial sense there is obviously an attempt to assemble facts in a subjective way in order to make a coherent and sensible report of any news event. To take again the example of a fire, one decision of salience might be to report on the flammability of the material the building is made of rather than its colour. — Baden

Then the decision of salience must be guided by truth to be in accord with reality, and once the truth is known about its nature, then the rest of the manipulation can ensue. Keep in mind that not everyone is in accord with reality the same way.

A great deal of the news consists of facts about what has been said. Don't expect this thread to be widely reported, but do expect He-who-must-not-be named's tweets about bias to feature.

And the news itself is something being said, so whatever appears in the news tends to become newsworthy. The latest news is that the news is biased - discuss. This is the echo-chamber of the media - tv reports on the papers that report on what's trending on the web, that provokes a reaction of speeches by the great and good and protests by the great unwashed, that are reported in the papers.

We are discussing the news as if we and our discussion are separate from it. As Mephistopheles allegedly said, "This is the news, nor am I out of it."

For a start, news reporting is obviously not purely in the realm of narrative and divorced from objective reality. That would be a better description of fiction (and even then facts usually make up part of the mix). Sometimes, for example, the facts do take centre stage and the narrative is fairly benign and aimed at providing a minimum of structure, so there's no significant bias to be concerned about. — Baden

According to Nikolas Luhmann, even when mass media look like reporting the essential news, first of all, they reproduce their own self-referential communicative machinic reality:
Even if one distinguishes different selectors in news and reporting, there is a danger of generating still much too simple an image of the way the mass media construct reality. It is true that the problem is in the selection, but the selection itself is a complex event - regardless of which criteria it follows. Every selection decontextualizes and condenses particular identities which in themselves have nothing 'identical' (= substantial) about them, but merely have to be identified in the context of being reviewed for purposes of reference, of recursive use, and only for that purpose. In other words, identity is only conferred if the intention is to return to something. But at the same time, this means there are confirmation and generalization. That which is identified is transferred into a schema or associated with a familiar schema"

If I tell you there was a fire in a department store downtown, and the news tells you there was a fire in the department store downtown, and there was a fire in a department store downtown, and neither of us gets overtly political about it, but reports basic facts such as when and where, we are doing essentially the same thing, and in this case worries about "bias" and talk of "narratives" sounds overheated. At other levels though, these issues become very important because the media both reflects and constructs social reality and being aware of how they do that is important in interpreting events.

identity is only conferred if the intention is to return to something. But at the same time, this means there are confirmation and generalization. That which is identified is transferred into a schema or associated with a familiar schema — Number2018

Presuming the "something being returned to/familiar schema" is a recognizable narrative, theme or background presumption like "fires are dangerous/bad", sure. I don't disagree with that. What I do find disagreeable is on discovering this sort of analysis of media, some people come to the conclusion that everything is "fake news" or loaded with some important political bias. It's not.

Political bias is solved by the vast number of media outlets available. Such variety hasn't always existed, so we should be thankful for it.

The bias we should be concerned about is the bias shared by almost every media outlet, the bias for drama. Most media is ad supported. That is, they aren't really in the news business, they're in the advertising business. Ad prices are heavily related to the size of the audience, and this pushes most media outlets towards the lowest common denominator. If it bleeds it leads, etc.

This bias for drama has some dangerous consequences.

As example, terrorists are in partnership with mass media. The terrorists provide the needed drama, and in return the media provides the terrorists with billions of dollars of free advertising. Everybody wins, except the victims.

A certain politician who is a ruthless business man from New York City, arguably the mass media capital of the world, has from his experience realistically understood that media is not a public service but rather a profit driven business, and he's worked that business model to the highest office in the land. Like the terrorists, he does his job by providing the media with a steady stream of drama and is rewarded by the media (even those who truly hate him) with the power that comes from being constantly in the cultural spotlight.

The best example I've seen of this bias for drama happened about a mile from my house. Remember that Florida preacher who threatened to burn the Koran? He was a complete total nobody, but he understood the bias for drama system and worked it, and became an international figure.

If I tell you there was a fire in a department store downtown, and the news tells you there was a fire in the department store downtown, and there was a fire in a department store downtown, and neither of us gets overtly political about it, but reports basic facts such as when and where, — Baden

There are tremendous gaps between 3 facts about “a fire in a department store downtown” – 1) when I learn it from you, 2 )when I watch news about it, and 3) the actual event of the fire – they have absolutely different cultural, anthropological and ontological status! Whatever is not mediated and reported by media does not actually exist.

the media both reflects and constructs social reality and being aware of how they do that is important in interpreting events. — Baden

So, what is actually going on when the media does report about the fire in downtown? As Luhmann pointed out: “Every selection decontextualizes and condenses particular identities which in themselves have nothing 'identical' (= substantial) about them, but merely have to be identified in the context of being reviewed for purposes of reference, of recursive use, and only for that purpose. “
Therefore, the main goal of reporting the fire by the media is just to use the actual event for involving and engaging a particular group of viewers, consuming “the breaking news “
according to the set of pre-established codes. The media localizes and structures not real socially independent autonomic groups, but socio-psychological patterns, created by its mass action. “Medium is the message.”

The bias we should be concerned about is the bias shared by almost every media outlet, the bias for drama. Most media is ad supported. That is, they aren't really in the news business, they're in the advertising business. Ad prices are heavily related to the size of the audience, and this pushes most media outlets towards the lowest common denominator. If it bleeds it leads, etc. — Jake

"It is important to understand that the possibilities, however, limited,
of manipulation and of the suspicion of manipulation, which
is sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes not pervasive, are a set
of problems internal to the system and that they are not an effect
generated by the mass media in the environment of their system."
It is not a bias or a kind of manipulation, it is how the media functions.

A news outlet could perhaps attempt to present all relevant or known narratives.