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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> What organization is really even credible anymore

Most of the major newspapers in the US are fairly credible, despite having issues like 'both-sidesism' and not doing well with asymmetry.

'Credible' doesn't mean "no mistakes". It means they own them and apologize for them. The Economist is still occasionally apologizing for buying into the WMD narrative during the run up to the war in Iraq.

The danger in "no one is credible" is that it elevates flat out propagandists to the same level as institutions that mostly get things right.

It's sort of like science as a process: what we think we know now may need correcting in the future, but real scientists have a process that allows for (sometimes difficult) course correction.

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Almost all American outlets are biased.

There are many with 'high integrity' (i.e. fact check, in depth, write well) but there's so much editorialisation, that they are biased.

You almost have to read the news off the wire, or watch local news to get straight news. Almost everything on CNN, Fox, NYT, WSJ etc. is editorialised in some way, even the non-opinion pieces.

Edit: to anyone that doubts this, consider spending a month reading outlets that you might suspect 'have a bias' (i.e. 'the evil other side'). It becomes very clear, very quickly. Some of the most prominent forms of editorialising, even in the more straight news items comes from what they decide is newsworthy, how the headlines are worded, the facts they decided to leave in vs. what they leave out. The kinds of guests, the form of questions. The main evening broadcast news in the US is decent, but almost everything on cable or in print has bias, even when it's 'high quality'. I should add that this is not an American phenom, there are hardly any large 'straight news' agencies in the world; maybe the BBC.

It's also helpful to read/watch the news from a different country, where you don't have a 'stake in the game' so to speak, and it becomes evident. If you use Google Translate on Die Welt, Der Spiegel, and Die Zeit - you can see how the same news is reported differently.

I don’t believe BBC is any better than NYT, WSJ or WaPo. I have seen BBC’s coverage of India at times can be highly slanted and headlines editorialised to the extent, even when the facts are correct, that you walk away with a different impression than what actually happened on the ground. If they can be slanted about one topic, it would be irrational to assume that they won’t be slanted about something else. Just that you’ll never be able to figure out if they were in fact biased or not because of the gell-mann amnesia effect.

The BBC is definitely better than WSJ, WaPo or NYT for straight news.

First - they are substantially bigger and have much wider operations than any of them - by far. They have global correspondents etc. - a much bigger news room.

Second - they are neutral. NYT, WSJ and WaPo are not. Their editors would admit that, clearly. NYT is a left wing American commentary. WSJ is an economically liberal entity. The BBC actually has oversight and scrutiny because it's a public institution.

It's easy to demonstrate: take any contentious news item of the day, and then see the coverage by those outlets. WSJ won't even cover social issues. BBC generally runs straight news, the NYT will have a lot of editorial coverage op-end on it.

As for 'India' - your confusing short (or wrong) coverage with bias.

I'm from Canada - and I see this all the time: US outlets constantly misrepresent Canadian political issues. This is not because they're bad, it's that different nations are hugely different contexts - it's often very difficult to communicate something nuance without spending an hour going over the issues. And sometimes they just get it wrong. Indian political affairs are complicated - it's hard to narrow anything down to a few sound bites without getting some things wrong. I'll also bet $100 that none of the WSJ, Wapo or WSJ even touched on whatever Indian subject the BBC was covering, their readers don't care, and they don't have the budget or correspondents. I should have pointed out obviously the BBC has a national bias - most outlets do.

If only American newspapers could get over their bothsideism, then they could report exclusively on the One True Side. Although that might be dangerous since journalists aren't experts in everything and so aren't qualified to choose sides (even if one side seems stupid to experts.)

There are plenty of examples where there is absolutely a side that is correct and one that is not.

Do you think the earth is flat or that people who say so should be given equal time?

There are plenty of other instances where one side is demonstrably correct.

>There are plenty of other instances where one side is demonstrably correct.

To who, an expert or a journalist? Flat Earthers can beat many people in arguments about the earth being flat, because general science knowledge is not very widespread. I could find plenty of journalists that don't know about, for example, the shadow length thing. The idea that newspapers should only quote truth-speakers does not address the reality of the limited knowledge of the journalists themselves. For them, flat earth theory is a choice between either ignoring everything but the mainstream consensus, or sometimes reporting on fringe groups. Clearly the second option is the right policy, especially because reporting on someone's claims does not imply that the newspaper thinks they are true. It may not be a fact that the earth is flat, but it is a fact that flat-earthers think the earth is flat. It may even be newsworthy.

Good journalists are bright enough to get enough information from enough people, assimilate it, and write it in a clear way for the rest of us.

They might do a 'human interest' story on crackpots like flat earthers, but good ones wouldn't "both sides" that issue, just as they shouldn't with other issues where there is strong scientific consensus, or verifiable facts demonstrating the veracity of one side's claims, and none on the other.

This isn't a new problem, and good journalists are capable of handling it.

Will they get it right 100% of the time? No. But the important thing is that there's a process and they're trying, and they'll admit it if they get it wrong. People get fired for getting things egregiously wrong.

None of that is true for propaganda outlets.

Good journalists will do the right thing no matter the standard policy, it's the bad journalists that need culture impressed upon them. Bad journalists are not good at telling who is right, so that makes bothsideism a good standard policy.

As always, thinking about flat Earthism is a terrible exercise for your brain. The fact that a few people exist who are utterly and obviously wrong about something, and that you’re not among them, should not encourage you to think that you’re probably right about any other issue.

I like Scott Alexander’s essay on this subject, The Cowpox of Doubt: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/

Basically, I think an irrational tendency towards “both sides have a point” is a lot better than an irrational tendency towards “my side is right”, and that humans tend to err in the latter way about ten thousand times more often than they err in the former.

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