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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

I think this election has demonstrated the media's bias fairly well.

This cracks me up because some people believe the media has treated Sanders unfairly, others believe they've treated Trump unfairly. Maybe both.

Personally I believe left/right bias isn't that interesting. The media has a strong bias toward sensationalism, and in elections there's a strong bias toward reporting on a horse race. Maybe this is the bias you're talking about. IMO these biases have helped Trump and Sanders respectively.

What a weird society we live in where everyone thinks the media is biased and few agree on exactly how.

Yea, but not their own recognition of the bias (which is the useful part).

Do you think they'd recognise their own bias? That would be like saying "we can't do journalism properly", because proper journalism is unbiased.

There is no such thing as unbiased journalism. Without bias, what you have is cacophony of competing interpretations of events. Even reporting "just the facts" consists of making judgement calls that introduce bias with respect to which facts you report, and what you accept as fact.

I'd rather have reports from sources that don't try to pretend to be unbiased.

cspan is probably the closest thing to unbiased journalism, it's great, but no, it isn't a money maker and is only entertaining to those truly seeking the raw content. I agree that for reporters, the least they can do is acknowledge their own bias. If anything, that acknowledgement goes far towards mitigating said bias.

> That would be like saying "we can't do journalism properly", because proper journalism is unbiased.

I'm not entirely sure about this. Trump's been eating the media's lunch in interviews; perhaps a more biased approach acknowledging his interview games would actually lead to better reporting.

Without bias how do you pick your stories? Without bias how do you pick your sources? Bias towards official sources is ubiquitous.

Bias is an integral part of journalism, it's up to the reader to understand this fact and collect information from multiple sources (if they're so inclined).

The media's bias is towards sensationalism. Bernie has the personality of cold oatmeal.

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