Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

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Complaints about bias in journalism only exist because of an idealist assumption that unbiased "news" or "facts" is something that exists. But it does not. Sure, there are some "objective facts," but they're really more measurements or scientific observations — today's temperature, yesterdays death totals, the price of a stock, the score of a sports game, etc.

Anything beyond the boundaries of this ticker of raw measurements depends on some level of narrative, and therefore bias. Even the driest, most unbiased reporting of "what happened" is not immune to selection bias in choosing which events to report.

Ironically, the more that a news organization pretends this purist ideal of unbiased news exists, the more biased it becomes in its effort to hide its natural biases.

In terms of raw signal/noise, a pair of oppositely polarized news organizations are more informative than a single "unbiased" one. I learn more about the "truth" (which is mostly a matter of perception) by reading both Fox and CNN, and comparing the overlaps and differences between them, than I ever could by reading a single "unbiased" source of news in the middle.

> Ironically, the more that a news organization pretends this purist ideal of unbiased news exists, the more biased it becomes in its effort to hide its natural biases.

Strong disagree. You're saying that the more someone tries to be unbiased, the more they end being biased? This seems like an excuse to embrace bias and push a narrative. I've never agreed with that regarding news.

I am a proponent of _openly_ embracing bias and pushing a narrative. The problems come when they try to hide it, by claiming to be unbiased (either deceptively or naively) while actually pushing a narrative. If everyone is open about their agenda, then the reader has more agency to triangulate the "truth" without first needing to cut through some layer of obfuscation.

I read his post which led to this. You should consider reading it, he cites specific examples. I think he had some good points.

There are serious journalistic problems with his concrete claims. For example the early part of it hinges on the Mueller report showing "no credible evidence of collusion" which is a straight up misrepresentation. It found many specific instances of collaboration, and some evidence of collusion but not enough to indicate criminal conspiracy. Which is messier than what he is implying and very relevant to his argument.

Later when he talks about the political affiliations of the newsroom, how did he access the voter registrations? How many of those people don't live in DC and so aren't registered there, and how did he count them? What are the professional-ethical implications of researching your coworkers in this way?

Your points seem irrelevant to this

NPR listener demographics

2011: 26% conservative, 23% center, 37% liberal, 14% ?

2023: 11% conservative, 21% center, 67% liberal, 1% ?

Is or should be their main editorial goal to exactly mirror the political affiliations of americans? Is that the issue Berliner was raising in his essay?

I didn't read it that way, and I do find this relevant to the points he was making, which were much more about journalistic practice and ethics than about the demographics of listeners per se.

Part of the problem with this stat, which I saw someone point out on Twitter, is that conservative demographics have changed since 2011. College-educated white voters, especially women, have shifted significantly toward the Democratic party during the Trump years, and that was probably the biggest listener demographic for NPR.

So NPR listeners in 2011 and 2023 could be the exact same people and the % of conservative listeners would have gone down. (That said, I suspect this isn’t the only explanation - NPR content has gotten more ideologically left during that timeframe too)

To what degree is this shift due to NPR's own actions vs. the pressure of the former president?

I would guess that any news source that is not specifically pro-Trump has bled conservative viewers/listeners/readers in the last 8 years.

No, YOU are misrepresenting the Mueller findings. As per the American Bar Association:

The special counsel found that Russia did interfere with the election, but “did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple efforts from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.”

https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...

With respect to obstruction: As far as obstruction, the Mueller report laid out facts on both sides but did not reach a conclusion. Barr’s letter said that “the Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”

Interesting when you say the parent is misrepresenting when that American Bar article is just a summary of the Muller report by Barr and Rosenstein, who both have come under criticism for their review of the report.

Are you really accusing the left-leaning American Bar Association of supporting Trump?

I'm merely pointing out your misrepresentation of the situation. It's not an article from the American Bar Association in support of your statement. It's a news article summarizing the findings of Barr. It has nothing to do with whether the bar is left or right leaning.

Yeah, this is what I remember. And I remember the media hype around his investigation.

There's literally one verified fact to the whole story, Trump's idiot son took a meeting he shouldn't have taken and then nothing serious came from it.

The entire liberal media was in a tizzy for a year about "collusion" and pee tapes, pulitzer prizes got handed out over it, and then everybody just got really quiet and stopped talking about it.

Kind of true, and very false.

Don't think of "bias" as a boolean. Think of it as a real value between 0 and 1.

You can't get perfectly unbiased. (I actually think I agree - you can't.) But you can get more biased and less biased, and the difference really matters.

Was Walter Cronkite perfectly unbiased? No. But he tried. Was the result better than, say, Fox News? Yes, it was.

There was an editor of the New York Times who, recognizing that his reporters leaned left, deliberately leaned the editorial stance of the paper somewhat to the right, in order to keep the results closer to neutral. He literally had "He kept the paper straight" put on his tombstone. The results were not perfect - they never are - but they were better than the results of "bias is inevitable, so we won't bother even trying" (which quickly transforms into "bias is inevitable, so we might as well run with our biases").

> Ironically, the more that a news organization pretends this purist ideal of unbiased news exists, the more biased it becomes in its effort to hide its natural biases.

"Citation needed".

I don't disagree with your general premise, that journalism always has some level of bias; it's likely impossible to create an unbiased narrative. That said, I find it difficult to get on board with the notion that seeking this perfection is self-defeating.

I also find it difficult to believe that choosing to simply get your news from two "known biased" news organizations is the more correct choice. Some of the so-called news reported on by a certain news agency is factually false. It's misinformation, and the only use it has is exposing the bias of the agency. Presuming the agency on the other extreme end of the spectrum is doing the same thing, all you have are two pieces of incorrect data. You haven't learned anything because there's nothing of value to be learned from something completely false.

> by reading both Fox and CNN

Most of us don't have time for that. I mostly prefer news oriented at business people, where too much bias would cost their readers real money, so the reporting tends to be more factual. So read WSJ rather than watch FoxNews, since even though both are owned by Murdoch, the former is for rich conservatives who have less time for idealistic BS.

WSJ is hilariously biased. It might as well be the financial arm of the NY Post at this point.

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