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Comment by denton-scratch | Hacker News Reader

"Unbiased" news is impossible; the reporter has biases, the editor has biases, the publisher has biases; which they may or may not be aware of. The biases they don't know about are the most insidious.

So I'm most suspicious of sources that brag about their objectivity. I prefer sources that wear their bias on their sleeve (provided they're actually news sources, and not overt propaganda or gutter tabloids).

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I'd much rather have one that tried to be objective, than just one that embraces their bias. The later one will always be terrible at reporting. The former at least has a chance of being good.

Seriously, the bar is not exactly high. Start with telling me where and when something happen, make a time line if it's a series of events. Tell me who is involved. Don't dress it in flowery language, make it as simple as possible, make it a list if you can. Do proper follow ups, not just event based reporting (i.e. tell me why the airplane crashed when the report is out, don't waste too much time with "we don't know anything, but here is a picture of smoke"). And of course list your sources (i.e. don't report on science paper without even linking it).

So far Wikipedia is the only one that gets somewhat close to this ideal. Almost everything else is just attention seeking clickbait.

> So far Wikipedia is the only one that gets somewhat close to this ideal.

Wikipedia now has this expectation that any claim that's at all surprising or interesting should be cited to "reliable sources". I don't entirely agree with WP's notion of what sources are to be considered reliable, but at least the policy is out there, and can be debated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

This citation policy wasn't always there, and it has made a huge difference. For example, anyone can come along and remove surprising statements from articles if they aren't supported by a reliable source. That in turn means that if you find a statement surprising, you can go and check the source.

I used to think this but increasingly I think it's a fool's errand.

Wikipedia might have been like that in the past but it's long been corrupted. E.g. see the Philip Cross affair.

For a while on the Ukraine war I tried to find unbiased commentary and news but I think it was basically impossible.

The best I could find after looking all over was stitching together stories from sources who were biased to one side but still at least somewhat committed to the truth.

FWIW I was unaware of the Philip Cross thing, but after digging into it it appears that Wikipedia's arbitration committee imposed an indefinite ban on him from editing any page regarding modern British politics [1] and that after he was found repeatedly violating it, that was upgraded to an indefinite block [2]. Not exculpatory, but at the very least evidence that Wikipedia is capable of taking issues of editor bias seriously and not sweeping it under the rug.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Philip_Cross#Blocked...

> For a while on the Ukraine war I tried to find unbiased commentary

There's no hope of finding unbiased commentary on a war that's happening NOW. Even the history of wars that happened 1,000 years ago are hopelessly muddied by contemporary political agendas.

As far as Wikipedia is concerned, history is one of the areas that's least trustworthy; lots of history articles have teams of gatekeepers. It can help to read the talk pages (and the archives of the talk pages) to find out what's been disputed.

The fact that you can do that, and also inspect the entire edit history, really does make Wikipedia head and shoulders better than any other information resource, provided you read it with due scepticism.

> propaganda or gutter tabloids

As an experiment, let's just think of the news industry as specialising in those two business lines. ^_^

Bias cannot be eliminated from the news business -- bias is the business. Even the sincerity of declared bias is no guarantee of good faith/ethics.

Consider the challenges that Wikipedia faces trying to represent knowledge about history and events in an objective manner.

"News" means different scope at different levels of conception.

    * NL0 = personal, individual; at this level, "news" is the for-profit business of feeding (and shaping) the individual mass of feelings and stubborn opinions; the only objective things at NL0 are Maslow's hierarchy and *the local weather*.

    * NL1 = regional power structure; at this level, "news" becomes part of regional economics, social policy, and broad weather patterns; political theatre begins obvious pandering at this level. 

    * NL2 = national power structure; at this level, national economic and social policy, regional economic tensions, perspective of international power structures and spheres of influence; political pandering is intense. 

    * NL3 = international power structures; at this level, various nations compete and/or cooperate economically and militarily; there are spheres of geopolitical influence.

News business will ally itself with a power structure. This is where democracy, for all its challenges, is still the best hope of any free (or free-ish) society.[1]

News "for the people" really depends on how militant the people are prepared to be.

So, for the most part, power structures write the news. State-funded news is only as reliable as popular confidence in the state providing the funding.[2]

[1] _ https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

[2] _ https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022

Yes, but it's perfectly valid to attempt to minimise biases. Simple things such as fact-checking and not using loaded language can go a long way to becoming more neutral.

But that's not what it says - it says it's unbiased, and leading with that doesn't exactly scream self-awareness about the problem at hand.

Simple things that you mention are great. But probably the nastiest kind of bias is the choice of what news to deliver in the first place; it's hard to detect bias in a news source from what it isn't reporting.

AI can't fact-check, only correlate sources with its limited understanding.

The bias in news reporting is an aspect of the sentiment the respective individuals have towards that news.

Socially, that bias is a more important part than the news' factual content itself, making comments here about how to "eliminate" it appear as a weird display of cluelessness.

People rightfully wish for a harmonious society. Eliminating other people's utterances of discontent is an approach usually employed in dictatorships.

> an aspect of the sentiment the respective individuals

I disagree. I'm a regular reader of Guardian Online; that organ has multiple institutional biases. Stories get spiked if they don't align with that bias. Reporters are forced out if they fail to toe the line.

It's not just The Guardian; all commercial news sources share this property.

I meant "respective individuals" in the sense, it's lastly humans being responsible for the written piece of news.

I find it very curious you would single out "The Guardian" of all publications. That organ is maybe the most independent one you will find today. It is owned by "The Scott Trust Limited", successor of the similarly named trust created to shield it from commercial interests.

Calling it a "commercial news source", as if it was the same as Murdoch's ilk, is an absurd take, even derogatory. Do you say that, because it is "centre-left"? What right-leaning source would you call "unbiased"?

I singled out The Guardian because it's the one I read daily, to learn what happened yesterday.

The Guardian (and The Scott Trust) is institutionally biased. It backed the Balfour Declaration, and to this day it remains pro-zionist. It's also pro-war, and backed the invasion of Iraq. It's got a lot worse since the Assange dremels-and-angle-grinders affair; it has become the primary mouthpiece of the UK security services.

It has the reputation of being a leftie paper; but that's an illusion. It holds up the left end of the Overton Window, and reliably backs the extreme right wing of the Labour Party. Its attacks on Jeremy Corbyn were consistent and cringe-making; even the token leftists in the newsroom were forced to join the pile-in.

I call it a commercial news source, because that's exactly what it is; it's a business.

I don't call any source "unbiased"; as I said up-thread, I don't think unbiased reporting is possible.

Legible News almost completely eliminates bias by providing short summaries of judiciously chosen stories.

> judiciously chosen

Some people would call that bias.

Not only that, but it's already selecting which news pieces to highlight. There's bias in that as well.

It's impossible to have unbiased news unless you're an omnipresent God.

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