I would be willing to pay an amount for better quality news than what can be found for free, however news outlets always seem to lean one way. I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.
So no, you can't have it both ways. You can't point to objective reporting and claim it has a bias, when in reality you mean that the reporting isn't showing your preferred bias.
Both are true, and which term you use just depends on your point of view. Both are true, but not unbiased.
There is no proper objectivity outside of the sciences. Everything in culture, society and politics depends on an everchanging inconsistent and observer-dependent frame of reference. You can be kind-of objective if all of you and your local neighbourhood agree on a common frame of reference. But you always have to be aware of the lack of global objectivity.
Critics agree that Mr Obama's middle name is Hussein and he is likely an islamic terrorist.
The first part is obviously true. For the second part, I am fairly certain I can find two people on 4chan who agrees with this, and they will certainly be critics of Obama.
Statements of objective truths can still be biased.
Could a legitimate news organisation (considering it'd be the biggest news of the day) justify not covering it, or moving their coverage to Page 56?
That's one of the biggest criticisms I see of bias in the media, is the flexing of prominence based on stories of a similar (wider) importance.
It's not hard to be objective when you put your mind to it. It's just that it doesn't pay since everyone has a spin they prefer.
Surely you understand the political connotations of the words deposed, king, executed, revolutionary, and government. Pretty much the only thing "objective" in your description is the guy's name.
So while they have a bias they acknowledge, it isn't a "beat them into submission" type of bias.
No one on this planet is 100% unbiased. It doesn't matter if it's free or $100 per article, it's still written by a human being with personal opinions, experiences, prejudices, &c.
The easiest way to get close to the "truth", which is subjective in many cases anyways, is to read from many sources and cross check the facts between them.
Should we forego every trial because no judge can be impartial? The argument is lacking.
That impartiality doesn't lead to economic success and sustainability for outlets is another story of course.
Cross checking is required even if journalists wouldn't be as active in framing stories of course.
Only state-funded news sources are imune to that, of course they have perverse incentives of their own.
But many find these sources unengaging since they report events as they occur and do not contextualize them in media narratives to the extent that more commonly popular news outlets do.
Individual news sources have almost always been biased. This is why most cities had at least 2 major newspapers until relatively recently. You could get the liberal one or the conservative one (or in some places dozens of wildly politicized papers, anarchist papers from the early 1900s are great).
Consolidation has lead to a removal of voices from most local newspapers and the market has spoken when it comes to television: people prefer partisan news sources. The internet has gotten us closer to that 1900 view but then Facebook/Google became the arbiters of news for most people.
> No one is 100% unbiased
No, and every journalist should know that and keep their own bias in mind when writing. One can have an opinion and still present a plausible alternative.
This all in addition to the biases that can come from the owners/company bankrolling the media house.
It would take a large conscious effort to get past all of these.
Simple recipe to follow:
- Show your work.
- Cite your sources.
- Corroborate.
- Sign your name.
- Admit your mistakes.
Voila, you're a journalist.
We're on the Internet. Link your sources or provide them as raw footage. At least it'd eliminate some attempts to modify/exaggerate news like the CNN is doing all the time.
This is unfortunately not possible. Even if an outlet only providing objective, verifiable facts there is some angle or bias in what facts you chose to report and what issues you chose to investigate.
You don't get much in depth, but you do get a good cross-section of how stories are reported, and you get to remove headlines which is the source of 96% of the world's troubles.
UK version does fairly well, 3rd after Private Eye and Economist. They do a junior version for I guess 8-13 year olds too which is doing well too, so that's good.
Friend of mine runs a magazine aimed at people who like horses (typically well-to-do female over 35s) with c. 25,000 copies a week pre-covid. It was about 70:30 subscription. Subscription is up a little since covid, but newsstand sales are way down.
The real danger is getting your news from a single social media or news org source.
I was a decades-long subscriber to the WSJ print edition and as long as I ignored the last few pages of the first section I was a happy camper. I cannot imagine what possessed Murdoch to engage in such value-destruction, but the FT and Economist are now my go-to sources for getting news that is as low-spin as possible.
AP seems to me to be fairly reasonable (not dramatically slanted one way or the other).