Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost. To give an exaggerated example:

----

- Air strikes in the US killed 15 targets in Mideastland. Representatives for the US armed forces stated the targets were high priority leaders of Al Boom Boom. Domestic news in Mideastland claims that the strike was on a hospital. There has been no definitive identification of the victims yet.

- The never ending war machine of the US continues to ravage Mideastland as a brutal attack on a hospital where many women and children were being treated has been destroyed with mass casualties reported. Here's a sad picture of a baby by some rubble that's not related to this incident.

- An elite fleet of aerial forces unleashed a precision surgical strike in Mideastland decapitating important parts of the leadership of the extremist terrorist organization Al Boom Boom. Locals were reportedly seen celebrating and toppling a statue of the fascist organization while waving US flags and singing the US national anthem.

----

There will, of course, be an unavoidable bias in what is covered since not it's literally impossible to cover everything. But in how things are covered, removing bias is not difficult and it's also testable. If an average reader can, with reasonable accuracy, state the biases and inclinings of the author of a news piece then it is biased.

The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing. Here [1] are a list of online newspaper archives. Most are free and some go all the way back to the 1800s. Compare then and now, and the difference is quite extreme. I expect we're going through a time today that people will look back on with some degree of bewilderment, not dissimilar to how we might think of things like the two red scares we've gone through. We, collectively, seem to lose our ability to think coherently and impartially quite easily, but at least historically it tends to right itself quickly enough.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...

There is no "extreme bias" in today's top publications. To use something terribly close to your example:

> Dozens of Russians Are Believed Killed in U.S.-Backed Syria Attack

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/world/europe/russia-syria...

First paragraph:

Four Russian nationals, and perhaps dozens more, were killed in fighting between pro-government forces in eastern Syria and members of the United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State, according to Russian and Syrian officials.

The article makes absolutely no judgement on the strike itself. It stresses the limits of information currently available, and quotes dozens of sources from all sides.

It then goes on to show, with lots of evidence, that such irregular Russian soldiers actually are in Syria. While people will probably latch onto this part as somehow being biased against Russia, it would be journalistic malpractice not to mention, for example, Crimea, where the exact same dynamic played out. I. e. denials of irregular troops being involved quickly being proven to be lies with Russia's official annexation of Crimea.

There is still bias in the form of choice of news to report. You may agree or disagree with that bias, and certainly some do a better job than others in reducing it, but it simply is not possible to avoid it, not least because many things are not objective.

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.

Yes, of course, if "it is factual, but people will call such neutral language biased" then there's mo argument here, and we can all go home and it doesn't matter if we have journalists or just read a random number generator's output.

But I was making an argument within the context of the parent, which was giving some absurdly biased "examples" and passing them of as something typical for today's top publication. And that's just not true.

Thanks for the article. Let's look over this since I see it rather differently.

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.

-----

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.

> There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost.

Perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that unbiased news is impossible; even rigorously bare-facts reporting expressed bias in the decisions of which facts are worth reporting, both on the macro scale (what events get stories) and the micro scale (what aspects of the event and reported.)

> The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing.

No, it's not; the diversity of biases found in sources with wide distribution is (and it's particularly a change from the period of extreme media consolidation in the decades just before the explosion of online media), but the degree of bias is not.

I do not think there's very much diversity of bias in today's publications. It mostly breaks down into a very binary partisan split. You have 'liberal outlets' that mostly sound identical and 'conservative outlets' that mostly sound identical.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com