All news is based. Anyone telling you otherwise (that they are fair and balanced and unbiased) is lying to you. I don't need CNN to explicitly tell me their biases, because they are not my only source of news. It's not CNN's job to make sure i get unbiased news. It my job to make sense of biased news and weave it into a consistent mental model of the world. This let's me do things like watch CNN and Fox News and recognize when they're not telling me the full story. That's the only way to fight this kind of thing.
It's one thing to put your message out there without having to constantly inform everyone you're biased, as CNN does. It's quite another to put your message out there and insist that everyone else is biased and therefore unfair and untrustworthy. This is what Fox News and Sinclair are doing. They don't want you to watch anything else, because it gives away the con.
> What's yours?
That's the thing about bias: It's multifaceted, and often subconscious. I could list some biases I'm suspicious I have, but this list would be incomplete and inaccurate.
If they had to put a disclaimer in front of every local news anchor saying "the following content was produced by Sinclair Corporation in collaboration with President Trump", there would not be a problem. Just like we do with other kinds of political advertisements.
The problem is not the bias. The problem is the deception about who is responsible for the content. And yes, this falls into the same category as government employees in St. Petersburg masquerading as US citizens while publishing political propaganda.
Because nothing in the world is perfect, and by acknowledging that you and others all have implicit and explicit biases you can use your critical thinking skills to learn about the world without blindly accepting other people's biases as your own?
When people say something is biased, they usually mean to an unreasonably high degree. As you say, the nature of the universe dictates that everything is biased in some way. While a news source inevitably has to pick and choose what stories it's going to report, most people would not consider it "biased" if it simply reported what events occurred and did not take place in writing opinion pieces. On the other hand people consider news to be biased when it skews too far towards editorializing content and telling people how they should interpret reality.
Take for instance every time the POTUS makes a speech, and I'm talking about presidents long before Trump; as soon as they stop speaking, every new station cuts to a group of pundits to tell you how you should interpret what the president just said. It's not journalism at all, and anyone who pays attention to politics a lot would be just as qualified to be a pundit. Why should anyone trust that level of bias over what was actually said? If the opinions of political junkies are more important than what was said, then we're basically screwed because it's not the people who decide how to view events, but it's news organizations who pay people to dictate opinion that create the narrative around events.
Yes, you can certainly sift through bias using critical thinking skills, but this only gets you so far when the news itself becomes more bias than actual reporting. We don't live in a perfect world where everyone is capable of critical thinking. If we did, then almost everyone would shut off the TV as soon as the president is done speaking. Instead, we live in an imperfect world where having highly biased news is really dangerous for a society that hasn't proven to be capable of coming up with its own perspectives when other perspectives are being foisted upon them by the press and the state.
>as soon as they stop speaking, every new station cuts to a group of pundits to tell you how you should interpret what the president just said. It's not journalism at all
I disagree entirely. That is the essence of journalism. Not to tell you what to think, but to provide context that helps interpret.
For example, reporting that people at a Trump rally were shouting "Lugenpresse" is one thing. Providing the historical context that such language was used by the Nazi's as a pretext for cracking down on the free press and on Jews is another. Just hearing the first may make you aware of a fact, but the second tells you the truth.
That's not necessarily what I am implying. I'm challenging the idea that, if all news is biased(beyond simply picking and choosing stories), one can reliably find the truth by essentially making a Venn diagram between biased sources and analyzing overlaps. I neither believe nor disbelieve that it's a pathway to truth. I have my skepticism because it provides no form of validation; if all sources are too highly skewed, any overlap becomes highly suspect and simultaneously difficult to test.
I am a roboticist, so I view this as an exercise in signal processing. A news agency is like a sensor, reporting that an event happened. We don't know what or how or when, so we use different signals and fuse them to arrive at a better understanding of "truth". The nice thing about sensor fusion, is even without external validation as to the truth, you can still approximate it with certainty using otherwise very noisy sources that may be biased one way or another. That's how I view watching the news.
That's an interesting perspective. Do you think that humans are capable of similar sensor fusion? If so, then does that mean that we shouldn't be worried about bias?
I think some humans are capable of this, but most aren't. We should be worried! But the answer to handle bias isn't to eliminate it, but to account for it appropriately.
The truth isn't biased, so if the news reports the truth, "x said y" and we have evidence that x said y, then it is not biased and therefore all new is NOT biased.
Right, so how do you determine how much you have to say to tell the "truth"? If someone makes a claim about an economic policy, is it "lying by omission" to not talk about the impact previous similar policies have been enacted? Or is that inserting your bias? If you aren't telling people the facts behind the claims then are you telling the truth? Which facts you decide to share or not share can be biased.
You still think the truth is objective after a year+ living in this alternative fact world? There is no such thing as a "truth" anymore. Even cold hard figures are negotiable. Remember "The employment rate was fake news before but it's very real now"
It's not that lies are getting to me, it's that I've changed my view about the all-convincing nature of facts. I never before understood how easy it is for people to just pick and choose a set of base facts to support whatever reality they want to live in.
