Ask HN: Where do you find 'objective' news reporting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you find 'objective' news reporting?

1 pointbegemotz3 comments

The trend for news outlets (on both the left and right) to reject the traditional values of journalism has led me to have very little interaction with the news. I've come to decide this is the lazy answer. Up until know, I have usually relied on things like allsides.com that espouse the 'know your bias' approach and while there will always be some bias, that is different from intentionally creating narratives in order to maintain viewership. Inspired by the comments in a recent thread, I would like to ask for your opinion on finding more neutral, objective reporting. Does it still exist?

View on HN

It is usually not called "news".

"News" is a ghetto of crap that's designed to stoke fear and hate, control your mind, etc. It was always that way, it is just the phenomenon has intensified and the human face has melted away.

Here's the best quick heuristic I can think of.

Anything that you make an appointment for to gather events that have happened recently is itself a pseudo-event:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e...

That means cable news, evening news, also magazines and the newspaper.

If something special happens, and somebody takes time off from their rat-race to write a book about it, go read the book.

I think the most damning indictment of the idea of "news" is this classic book

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-Bagdikian/...

where he points out that the editor of a newspaper in 1970 had 6 seconds to look at a newswire story and decide it is not fit to print.

In summary: if you have to crunch down the days events to a 30 minute programme that's like going from the LA. River to sucking through a straw. It's almost inconceivable that the relevant content would end up on the news and not on the cutting room floor -- the very act of editing does damage to the fabric of reality.

The chart linked below [1] shows a relationship between bias and level of synthesis is the reporting. Reality is more complex, but the idea is that information services that are just presenting facts can have less bias than investigative news or outlets that do more analysis and synthesis of a story, and necessarily need to take positions on the way they present it.

Of course even for pure factual reporting, there are still decisions made of what to report on and what to leave out.

[1] https://www.adfontesmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Med...

This is very interesting. Thank you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com