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Comment by plaguepilled | Hacker News Reader

Sincere question: why do we consider "news" objective in this context? By any other measure it isn't.

Edit: getting a lot of down votes but not a lot of discussion below. This isn't just a "whatever maaaaaan I'm not a part of this system" post. It's also not a thinly veiled attempt to push a political view. I really am talking about objectivity.

For example, even among publications that share my general bias, it is easy to identify that they are omitting information that could be relevant in the name of cohesion and persuasion.

I am not willing to ascribe a certain motive for it because there is truthfully a lot of potential motivations. But that doesn't change the fact that the bias exists, and we cannot call it objective as a result.

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Journalistic objectivity is an intentional and aspirational goal, not something that’s guaranteed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity#His...

Does that actually translate into deliverables though? I'm not convinced it does which is why the question was posed

As far as I can tell, it doesn't, but having many records with the same bias over a significant period of time (as newspapers tend to do, though not always only one - Each columnist may have their own, but that's why there are bylines) can help you distill that out.

Nobody can ever be perfectly objective, but trying to maintain objectivity gets you a lot closer than rejecting the ideal outright.

The problem is that the news business has largely failed, and for the few players left, objectivity is no longer the goal, whether that’s due to explicit choice to prioritize ideology over objectivity, and/or simply prioritizing survival. It’s expensive to produce good journalism.

While I agree with the goal of 'good journalism' I also want to posit that striving for objectivity is importantly distinct from being objective - which I think you agree with based on this most recent comment.

It’s probably good to look at everything you think you know about history through that filter. History is a small number of people trying to build coherent stories from a random assortment of source material. 99.99% of everything that happened is left out of the stories, and what is left is told through those few people’s personal lens.

all news is biased. all discourse is biased. That's why you have multiple voices, multiple sources you need 2 consider always. There's no such thing as objective truth. source: English major.

I have to disagree with that statement. There is objective truth. Reporting a news item can be vastly differ based in on the end goals.

The issue with objective truth in the platonist sense is that no one can know what it is without total system knowledge, which is physically impossible (if you disagree with that last bit, Heisenberg would love to know your location to hbar/p precision).

Said another way: we can make 'logically' true statements easily, but struggle with anything physical.

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