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Comment by hh3k0 | Hacker News Reader

All media outlets are, only the degree of audacity varies.

https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings

CNN is especially eggregious. NYTimes should also be on the left column which is reflected in the votes "Somewhat disagree" with the current characterization as Center-Left (scroll down).

Edit: I am just pointing out a free publicly available dataset of what the population thinks of the media. Make what you will, don't shoot me.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with bias toward a specific side, unless you make the flawed assumption that the truth must be in the center.

The truth is scattered around all points of the spectrum, left, right, center, and everywhere in between. The flawed assumption is thinking otherwise. In such a world it’s still wrong (non-optimal) to try to manipulate the news to make it seem all truth is on just one side.

Quid est veritas?

Politics is preference, talks of truth are usually a pretense to strengthen a reason for a given preference.

How about no bias towards any side? I know, it's never happened, but what if?

You can't interpret any fact without an internal model of how the universe works. That model is a "side" and compared to any other model, has a difference called "bias".

There is presumably one true model that matches reality best. You could call that "unbiased", but since nobody can reliably identify it, we're stuck with bias.

That's all very nice and all, but there's "bias from worldview" and then there's CNN

That agree/disagree seems to be missing an opportunity, because you don't know what the disagrees think it should be instead - despite collecting that data when you click disagree. So it could be that people actually think they're more in the middle or even right than further left. Unless I'm missing something? Also seems to be extremely easy to game at first glance.

I see what you mean. When you vote, it follows up asking the user to also specify the correct button on the spectrum. But, your observation is correct, we don't know whether people disagree on it being left or center. This one is easy though :-).

I just noticed that and edited my comment before noticing your reply. It seems really odd that they don't show that distribution, it seems to be by far the most interesting data they're collecting there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com