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Comment by gridlockd | Hacker News Reader

Call me a dreamer, but I believe unbiased reporting should be the goal of journalism and I associate a "political bent" with poor quality.

You must be associating (lack of) quality with how sensationalist/tabloid-style a publication is, which is more superficial.

> I appreciate being exposed to alternative views that consistently challenge my own

Which is why a publication should aim to challenge its readers with opposing opinion pieces, instead of constantly reinforcing their beliefs (aka "the easy way out").

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> Call me a dreamer, but I believe unbiased reporting should be the goal of journalism and I associate a "political bent" with poor quality.

If you want "unbiased reporting" you get articles like: Angela Merkel ate Aspargus yesterday.

That's unbiased. It's also irrelevant. Anything more interesting will always have a bias as long as it is written by humans.

For (largely) unbiased reporting read the Financial Times - https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/financial-times/

The Guardian do pretty well: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/ - but are well known to be left leaning

Financial Times have a very strong bias towards liberal economic policy. They support de-regulation and reduced state involvement in markets. Similar to the econmist.

> Anything more interesting will always have a bias as long as it is written by humans.

While that is technically true, it's also a completely meaningless objection. Like I said, being unbiased is the goal. It's an ideal.

For comparison, even though it may be technically impossible to have zero lead in drinking water, your goal is still to minimize it.

The notion that reasonable reporting is some kind of unattainable ephemeral ideal is obvious nonsense pushed forward by ideologues. Before 2014 most of the mainstream media were keeping their biases in check. It doesn't mean they had no biases or that they were always objective, but they tried. Today they simply don't. It is normal to pepper news articles with expletives, inject political rants into unrelated subjects and do wild speculation.

It's not like all the news articles from before 6 years ago have been lost in a fire. One can still go and read them. Even look at front page snapshots via archive.org. The different is astounding.

Show me a news paper without a political bent? Centerism or balance for the sake of balance is also a political bent. The Guardian does a better job than most in reporting hard facts and news about the world.

I wonder if you apply your standard for quality to everything you read in an unbiased way?

Centrism isn't the same as "unbiased". That would be the "truth lies in the middle" fallacy.

Let's take global warming. Some people on the right may say it doesn't exist. Some people on the left may say it exists and it is a great danger. The "middle ground" would probably be something like "It exists, but it is not such a great danger". The "unbiased" view would be whatever the science says.

> I wonder if you apply your standard for quality to everything you read in an unbiased way?

No. I don't apply it to HN comments, for instance.

You're agreeing with my point.

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