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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Sadly they only measured bias in the sense of how much people is biased in relation to the brands, they didn't found out a way to measure articles quality and then cross with the data they collected from readers.

Example: in my country the most popular news outlet has lots and lots of haters, obviously there will be bias against their brand, but not undeserved, they admitted themselves openly to have manipulated news for political reasons in the past, caused some mass panic and ruined people lives with literal fake news, got convicted more than once for libel, and their reporters and anchors often express their political views openly on air...

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Is that like CNN threatening to doxx some random nobody because he made a political gif? That they're so biased, they're actively participating in the political game?

> actively participating in the political game

At least in the British system people acknowledge this as a reality of newspapers, which generally endorse specific parties or candidates. The TV news is more of a problem. I'm not sure the problem with BBC political coverage is bias per se as that much of it is terrible and includes inviting terrible people to be on Question Time because they generate lots of controversy.

(It's also interesting that we on the internet consider doxxing to be some sort of Queensbury rules violation, while newspapers consider finding someone and interrogating them on their doorstep in front of their family to be standard operating procedure. Not to mention hacking their voicemail.)

Well, in the UK TV news is supposed to be politically unbiased and neutral by law. It's not and the stations all have quite strong biases, it's not so obviously about specific parties but rather specific issues that journalists happen to care about. Moreover it's become common for journalists to openly admit to political bias and nothing to be done by the regulator. This is why I've come to believe that neutrality laws are a waste of time.

W.R.T. Question Time, I'm not sure what you mean by "terrible people" (this itself seems like a rather problematic extension of political views to inherent goodness or evilness of a person), but it's pretty common for the BBC to fill Question Time panels with people who are not representative of the country, e.g. one person who is in favour of Brexit and all the rest are against. Presumably if political neutrality was aggressively enforced they'd try to match viewpoints on political panel shows with the rough proportions you'd find in the actual population.

Context: The POTUS broadcasted the gif. Afterward, CNN claimed to have found the original creator, who CNN had kept anonymous but reserved the right to de-anonymize them if circumstances warranted.

It was the conditions of reserved the right to de-anonymize them if circumstances warranted that made CNN look bad.

CNN only "looked bad" to people who are already hopelessly biased. Investigating sources of government propaganda is exactly what the media should be doing to any sane person. It's unfortunate though that CNN chose to give the guy an out. The protocol here should be maximum disclosure.

I find CNN's behavior completely reasonable.

Basically, they investigated and then showed gasp discretion. Yet, people somehow think they did something wrong?

The issue is the implication, that if the guy had not apologized they would then do something. Instead of only doing something if the guy started sending death threats or something.

> Basically, they investigated and then showed gasp discretion. Yet, people somehow think they did something wrong?

The problem is it seems they used their journalistic position to blackmail someone into a particular course of action, and they are using the threat of future blackmail/doxxing to enforce continued compliance from that person.

IMHO, it's journalists' job to report newsworthy facts to the public. It's unethical for them to either hide or reveal facts based on other agendas, which include such small agendas as getting a particular reddit jerk to be a bit more circumspect.

> The issue is the implication, that if the guy had not apologized they would then do something. Instead of only doing something if the guy started sending death threats or something.

Was the creator of the gif actually sending death threats and the like, or is that something you made up?

> The problem is it seems they used their journalistic position to blackmail someone

Now, if CNN actually threatened the guy that's not ok. But, this comes down to what you assumed might have happened, not something that we know actually happened. Another possibility is they called the guy up for a story and he was instantly apologetic on his own initiative.

> Was the creator of the gif actually..

I said "if the guy started" as I assumed he had not done so.

I am simply saying treating such things as potentially serous signs of another possible newsroom shooting in the making is understandable. Not because of his actions are unreasonable, rather because of crazy people also doing similar things in the past. Organizations of this size are already paying people to do this stuff, the guy happened to hit the radar enough that he was next on the list.

Here is what CNN printed:

>CNN is not publishing "HanAholeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

>CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-user-tr...

You know the first amendment explicitly guarantees freedom of the press for the purpose of the press being involved in the political game. The media was far far far more biased in the early days of the country than it is today. Newspapers were flat out run by and for political parties.

> Sadly they only measured bias in the sense of how much people is biased in relation to the brands, they didn't found out a way to measure articles quality and then cross with the data they collected from readers.

Yeah. It seems to me that they found out that people impart the bias they know a media company has onto the output of that company.

I think a better rephrasing of the findings would be: 'people are not able to properly identify the bias of an article just by reading the content'.

That's backwards. People are found to assign a bias based on the source irregardless of the content. Do I trust articles from FoxNews less just because they are from FoxNews? If so, that's a bias on my part.

No, it's not backwards. It's very easy, even for a biased source, to make information in an article seem non-biased. Therefore, it's imperative to view the content of an article within the framework of by whom it was published.

You realize that your position is, effectively, circular, right? Your argument is that readers can't determine an article's bias by reading it. There seems to be a definition of bias you're using here that can't be measured.

> You realize that your position is, effectively, circular, right?

It's circular in the sense that because a bias is perceived from an organisation, the content of that organisation is attributed a certain bias by the reader, which reinforces the reader's idea of that organisation's bias.

Although that is, indeed circular, it's also how humans tend to perceive and process information.

> Your argument is that readers can't determine an article's bias by reading it.

I fail to see how that is true. If I were to, for example, write an article about a contentious subject, say, for example the positive or negative effect of Trump on America's economy, how, from just the article itself, would you be able to determine whether it was a biased or not?

> There seems to be a definition of bias you're using here that can't be measured.

I didn't make claims about the measurability of bias.

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