A Basic Cohort Test of the Lead-Crime Hypothesis

E.g. "pro-government forces" is factual, but many supporters of the "members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State", which is also factual, will consider it pro-Assad bias to use such neutral language about both sides, and vice versa, exactly because it leaves out the background.

And there is not single, objective unbiased solution to that, even if you ignore that their very selection of what to report on also inevitably will be biased.

Personally I prefer openly biased sources, because then I don't have to deal with reporters pretending to be neutral while including or omitting information on the basis of biases anyway.

The article states, "there are hundreds if not thousands of contract soldiers in Syria whom the Russian government has never acknowledged." According to whom and why? And if their estimate is so unreliable as to have an error margin on the order of magnitudes would it not be more accurate to state an unknown number? Anyhow, they not only take their controversial statement as a given, but then go on to offer a completely bizarre explanation for why they were deployed. According to the article, "They were deployed both to help keep the official cost down and to avoid reports of casualties, especially with a March presidential election in Russia fast approaching.". Again according to who? And idea that these secret soldiers are because of an election seems dubious, at best. Putin's approval rating is around 75% with 0 substantial opposition. His reelection is little more than a formality regardless of what happens in Syria.

Let's now look at some of their named sources for which you reference "lots of evidence." One bit of evidence was literally what a source, described only as "a woman from central Russia", said in "a brief online chat." And then they reference what they, again literally, describe as "investigative bloggers." And on top of all of this the article originally stated Russians were killed in the airstrike, when the source actually said Syrians. Regardless of whether or not that was a genuine mistake, it really should make you question their editorial standards for such a key fact to be night and day wrong.

There are many other such issues throughout the article, but let's stop there since I think the point is more or less clear. Look at it this way. Imagine this article was discussing an issue for which you had less personal biases, and from an outlet you also had no biases of brand recognition and trust towards. You would consider it to be dubious, at best. When we read things from sources we trust or that confirm our own biases, we turn off our ability to think critically.

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Granted the above is a tangential issue to bias - reporting quality. But the two tend to be strongly connected. When you want to push a story but the data to support such a tale isn't there, you have a choice of either moving on or turning to lower levels of support for your view. And in times past I think the choice there would have been dead obvious for the New York Times. Citing what somebody, who is again literally described as "a woman from Russia", wrote online is insulting the intelligence of your readers and instills a sense of incredulity for the article in the mind of anybody who's not taking what you write as beyond reproach. Nonetheless, they chose (and have regularly chosen now a days) to go down this path. And this is something new.

In the past there was less child-like black and white conflict, but there was vastly more disagreement on views and papers willing to publish things that fell outside the expected grain. The New York Times was a real leader in this regard. My favorite example is probably from an article from 1920. The NYT ran a featured editorial arguing that rockets could not actually work in a vacuum, like space, since 'there would be nothing for its thrust to push back against.'

They were obviously very wrong, but nonetheless were willing to consider views that ran against the grain even for the time. And that is a good thing. Many of the things they were right on were also equally 'out there' at some point, but I'm not mentioning those as we have the bias of 'well that really happened' so the truth doesn't seem as bizarre as it really is.

The problem we have now a days is that the media has become so collusive and incestuous that they rarely publicly disagree, again beyond the partisan split which I can only describe as child-like. And, in my opinion, this is likely intentionally done under a belief that having a unified front would increase their apparent integrity or confidence. Collusive groups like JournoList turned CabaList would work as some evidence towards this. However, at the same time it also completely destroys any notion of competence when everybody gets something so completely wrong. A very recent example of this would be the so-called 'sonic weapons' used 'against' US diplomats in Cuba. In spite of the media going into a unified frenzy of speculation and finger pointing, literally no major outlet took the logical, even if outsider, position that this probably was not even an attack in the first place. And now that it seems like that it indeed was not, it leaves the entire media system looking like a joke. Even when there are only two options (is a weapon, or not a weapon), nobody managed to get it right. That's sadly impressive and again something that was far less frequent an occasion in the past.