I felt things like PBS are a public good. Growing up I got educational programming from there and that should be available to the public as a last resort.
It’s a lack of integrity.
You need aligned incentives.
Getting all the facts is as bad as getting no facts, because we aren't capable of paraing then all. Curation of facts is what these companies do, and how they curate them is how they express their bias.
News companies aren't lying (even if some pundits do). They just present facts in ways to support the narrative they want. It is impossible to relay facts without doing so, but how objective they are and how much vias is injected is variable.
Facts are meaningless without proper context. You can take the same facts and present them under a different light and get completely different stories. Check "selective editing" if you are not aware of the term.
Even when I read unbiased information/data driven articles there’s still a bias - someone chose this information for me to digest. Did they choose it to influence how i feel? Maybe just because they think the most people will click on it so it’s published? Anyways, I’m not entitled to “truth” so I guess I have to keep reading/doom scrolling.
That is a US-centric viewpoint. I'm in the US now and I don't find any need for those. Maybe because I'm too busy outside doing fun stuff most days and living. I don't know of a good reason to give those publications more than a glance once per year.
Maybe, that's literally the problem. It's become a massive echo chamber. Not hard to imagine how the conspiracy theorists have come up with the mockingbird media moniker
I remember a while back (maybe 10 years?) NPR spent some airtime trying to address head-on their alleged liberal bias. I respect that, I think their effort was sincere.
What left me frustrated, though, was they never addressed what I saw as their main vector of bias: they seemed to broadcast many more interviews with people unhappy about conservative policies, than people happy with conservative policies.
E.g., illegal immigration was a hot topic at the time. NPR provided a lot of sympathetic interviews with illegal immigrants, both adults and children. I don't think I heard even one NPR interview with individuals in other groups, e.g. construction companies that get out-bid by competitors who pay illegal immigrants under the table, or would-be immigrants who are awaiting their turn to legally enter the U.S.
Again, I don't doubt the integrity of Bob Edwards and other NPR staff who tackled that project. But I think it shows how hard it can be for liberals to accurately understand conservative perspectives.
The results are then compared. The findings are apparently always the same when this is done: conservatives pretending to be left wingers give answers much closer to the real left wingers than vice-versa. That is, the right understands the left but the left doesn't understand the right. It's been some years since I read about this but iirc the failure mode was that the left imagined people on the right as having far more extreme views than they really do, amongst other problems.
W.R.T. the construction companies - see my comment elsewhere in this thread about the quote-sourcing feedback loop. Not so many companies are willing to talk to journalists about illegal immigration, because they know journalists are left-biased and because it'd realistically have to be the CEO doing it, and he/she is busy. That in turn means journalists don't hear alternative perspectives, causing them to become more biased, and repeat.
https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...
> "In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?"
I believe this passage refers to work done Study 2 in "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations"
https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhaidt/articles/graham.haidt.no...
In my brief reading of the paper, it's not clear to me whether they've reporting their findings on the understanding aspect, though the materials section for Study 2 sounds like the situation described. (They may have, I just haven't read it closely.)
> "As with relevance items, there were three versions of the moral judgment items—answered as oneself, as a typical liberal, or as a typical conservative. For both types of items, only results for the self versions are reported here."
You can say whatever you want about how/if you think that influences their coverage.
But it is not an arm of Amazon.
I don’t think it changes my point too much, but it’s absolutely a worthwhile amendment.
Case in point: The last time I looked at the conservative news was a few weeks ago. They were making a big deal about some lawsuit one of the states was bringing against the Biden administration. The administration allegedly censored news outlets, starting early 2020. The lawsuit even provides a specific example from October 2020, and names Biden specifically as the defendant.
Reputable news agencies mostly ignored these allegations because they are complete nonsense: Biden wasn't president when the incidents occurred, so his administration could not have been responsible!
My best guess is you think anything but pure anti-capitalism must be right-wing, but if you view the left-right ideology spectrum as a reflection one's views on economic policies, it's quite clear that would not be the case.
You don't get to hold me accountable for others failures. If you're hazy on the definition of the term "leftist" I expect google could help you with that.
I'm holding you accountable for self describing yourself as an "actual leftist," which obviously means your idea of what it leftist means deviates from what is the commonly held belief. The person you initially responded to said that all the sources the person listed was left-wing. You obviously took issue with that but you failed to explain why they're not, you simply used it as an excuse to lazily jab at the right-wingers.
If you don't want people to hold you accountable for your words, don't make asinine comments completely devoid of substance.
Left-Wing: the section of a political party or system that advocates for greater social and economic equality, and typically favors socially liberal ideas; the liberal or progressive group or section.
There you go. Those are the definitions provided from the Oxford English Dictionary. These clearly fall in line with what most people think of the terms and coincide neatly with what the above person was suggesting — those publications are left-wing.
> being unable to accurately place political ideologies on the political spectrum
This is largely because the the left-right political spectrum is bogus. Clearly you think you're a "real" leftist even though your idea of leftism is quite clearly contradictory to its definition which was my whole point. You had an opportunity to elucidate your point of view but instead you expect other people not only to perform that labor for you, but get upset when it doesn't match your head canon. No one else knows what "Leftist" means to you except you.
> Incidentally, assinine is veering off topic to try to fabricate a shit-flinging contest over easily defined vocabulary terms. You certain you've got a handle on who the ass is in this exchange?
The whole conversation is about what words mean, so no, it's not veering off topic.
If one person says "These publications are left-wing" and you say "I'm a real leftist and I say they're not," it is not unreasonable to ask you to define those terms. You are contradicting them, it absolutely is your fault when you don't define what those terms mean from your point of view. So I once again ask you, what is a "leftist" and what is "left-wing," from your point of view? If you can't even define them, how can you claim to be them?
WSJ is probably the closest. They don't dig into culture wars but definitely skew capitalist. The Bulwark is a decent independent source but they're small and do more opinion and analysis than reporting. Mainstream conservative news like Fox is just garbage and hopelessly corrupt. The level of direct collusion between Fox stars like Hannity and sitting republicans is utterly shameful. They aren't just biased they are downright running campaign ads disguised as news. And they're staring down a $1B defamation suit for stories they ran at the behest of the Trump admin which should bury the last shred of credibility.
It’s hard for me to take seriously anyone who suggests any major news media operation in the US is “left-wing”. This country doesn’t have a big or strong enough “left” to matter.
reuters.com is free as an invdividual, you just need to make an (entirely free) account or you get limited to X articles per month. I don't think apnews.com even asks you to make an account.
That said, it’s still driven by ideology — “good” being defined by someone. You can see it in the titles of their documentaries and programming.
If you go through their programming objectively and put yourselves in the mindset the opposing side it becomes rather clear. This includes things like portraying nationalism as bad or Christianity as evil (see some of their frontline documentaries)
While the bias is there. PBS is generally one of the least bias in the space, I think that’s what makes it so frustrating. A slight improvement in breadth and depth would make it amazing.
I also have to give credit to pbs for often releasing full-length interviews. I’ve really appreciated watching hours long interviews with various people about a specific topic. See “Putin files”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk9igTqTx9s
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b1HWNcLDK88
or Steve bannons interview on frontline.
> We don't want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don't want to waste the listeners' and readers' time on stories that are just pure distractions
Terence Samuels, NPR's Managing Editor for News on the NY Post Hunter Biden story
https://mobile.twitter.com/nprpubliceditor/status/1319281101...
These are just extra words :) I like PBS a lot
It makes me sad. Sometimes, I listen to old archives from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/npr-all-things-considered
and stuff like Car Talk on NPR. It was a beautiful world.
I have no trust left for NYT, WaPo or whatever right wing media is around blasting stuff on TV today. It is toxic.
As much as I personally think the Republican party is absolutely fucking evil for the specific issues they capitalized on — because good god lower taxes, eliminating government agencies, and less powerful unions doesn’t pour gasoline on festering racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia creating a tire fire of hate and violence that will outlive me — I’m not mad at the game in abstract, Democrats play it too.
AP is just as biased as the rest. Even if you remove ads the people with agenda are still everywhere.
> PBS are a left public good.
Fixed that for you, because it's so obvious how it has changed.
White people, at least in America, aren't a group with shared culture. The only thing that really unites them is the color of their skin. White people also tend to have an actual ancestral culture they identify with highly-- usually the culture of a European country their predecessors emigrated from. And as far as I know the vast majority of them don't want to identify as 'white', as they value their ancestral culture more.
Whether you agree with that or not is one thing, but I'm not sure why you're ignoring it.
[0]: https://archive.ph/aqpJM,
Archive since they've merged the ratings for clarification, but haven't actually changed their minds.
We don't have a "White History Month" because white history is the default in the US. In a sense every month is a white history month here. Note that we do have months for some subsets of white, e.g., Irish-American Heritage Month (March).
Same for why we have LGBT Pride month but no straight pride month. Straight is the default.