Hacker News Reader

Comment by thatfrenchguy | Hacker News Reader

> If our journalists are perceived as biased

The point of journalism is to be biased, no-one is neutral. Pretending to be neutral is a huge issue, because it means as a person you can't see your own biases.

View on HN

> Pretending to be neutral is a huge issue, because it means as a person you can't see your own biases.

There is a difference between making an effort to remain as unbiased as possible and pretending to not be biased or partisan. There is a difference between making a good faith effort at objectivity and claiming complete objectivity. Saying 'well everyone is biased so holding ourselves and others accountable to a standard of objectivity is bad and we should stop it" is a great way to make sure that the Kelleyanne Conways of the world get a platform.

> The point of journalism is to be biased

I can certainly see why you might think that with how MSM reports today.

An unbiased human works about as well as an untrained neural network. But journalistic integrity requires objectivity despite any bias you might approach a story with.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity

This has especially been an issue at the Times as of late. Their desire to be neutral on the coverage of the Google Memo led to them quoting misogynists word for word without any commentary.

This may depend on what you mean by journalism. When I visit news sites, I am there exclusively for factual information on events that are occurring. I do not want to know what the writer happens to feel about these issues.

This probably sounds somewhat radical in today's times, but that's largely because of how the media has changed. In my opinion that change has been for much the worse. An example of what I would consider phenomenal reporting is this [1], the New York Times coverage of Watergate, just before the election of 1972. It is pure professionalism. I have no clue what the author thinks of the situation. There are no moral or character judgements, labels, or aspersions directed in any way. There is no implication or connotation of anything beyond what is there. It is a simple clean and elegantly written reporting of information with all basic relevant facts quantified so much as possible. It is then left entirely up to the reader to survey the evidence and come to their own conclusions. It's unpleasant to compare that to the media of today.

[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/01/archives/the-watergate-mys...

Amen

I don't agree that it's all about pretending. Thoughts generally precede actions but it can go both ways too. For me, the benefit of aspiring towards objectivity helps affirm the mentality that I don't/shouldn't have a stake in the outcome, which keeps my mind open to more searching when I find that my presumptions don't (or do) match reality. In situations where I don't care about objectivity, I'm quicker to fall into confirmation bias.

I think the BBC does a good job of being as neutral as reasonably possible. They do it by being equally biased against everyone. Obviously, they’re not perfect, but listening to people like John Humphries it’s not obvious what their political persuasions actually are. Oftentimes, all political parties accuse them of being biased.

I think part of the issue is that it is literally impossible to have a news organization that everyone thinks is unbiased. Even if you just report straight facts people will claim bias just on the set of facts that you report. I think this is a lot of the reason there is such a diversity of news sources.

Certainly it's impossible, because choosing which facts (even if we grant they are "facts") to report is a form of editorializing.

Agreed. This attempt to whip journalists into being neutral is a fool's errand. It just means the bias will leak out in subtle, unmodeled ways.

Let there be bias. Let it be clear what the bias is so readers can appropriate weigh the different reports.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com