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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

> Trying to be unbiased is a futile effort

That seems to be the conventional wisdom. I sometimes get on newspapers.com (not free, unfortunately) for my articles, and for the Pullman Strike series I used the NYT for excerpts. This was 1894-95.

So no, it's not futile; it's just difficult. They were doing it, and that's part of what made them the "newspaper of record" (a rep which they're busy squandering now).

I'll refrain from the shameless self-promotion for a change and not include links, but I posted all of them to HN. Or of course you could use the 7-day free trial on newspapers.com.

As for your last, sentence: no, the adjective "genocidal" is not OK. "Unbiased" would be a description of what the army is doing, with another story "Does this qualify as genocide?" Or quotes from organizations calling it genocide.

View on HN

Presenting both sides is not the same as being unbiased. The bias materializes in e.g.

a) Giving one side a favorable treatment

b) not presenting the full argument of the other

c) missing the viewpoint of a third, fourth, etc. side

d) when one side is just plain wrong, not presenting it as wrong, but of equal merit.

e) etc.

The bias can be as simple as who you present as the subject in your headline.

As for the Pullman strikes, I don‘t know much about the subject but when the New York Times called it: a struggle between the greatest and most important labor organization and the entire railroad capital. (quote I got from Wikipedia) they were definitely showing a bias, theirs just happened be judged better by history than the rest of the journalistic world at the time who had a different and much worse bias (and as such much more obvious in hindsight).

So you went to Wikipedia. Now do some real research.

"Unbiased" means presenting the facts: what actually happened. You're right; it's not the same as "presenting both sides."

I would think that unbiased would mean presenting all the pertinent facts.

Nowadays, "bothsideism" is considered a mortal sin in journalism and only the facts that support a particular viewpoint should be transmitted. Any other facts are d/misinformation and should be censored.

> unbiased would mean presenting all the pertinent facts

Exactly. As Edward R. Murrow used to say,

"Don't tell me what you think. Tell me what you know."

Thats not what journalists do (or at least not good ones). Journalists’ job is to contextualize the facts and interpret them in a wider sense.

I’m also not sure this is actually an Edward R. Murrow quote. I went looking but couldn’t find the source. The closes I found was:

> American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.

https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1084314

Which actually place more into what I’m saying, that a good journalist will tell a truthful story with the aim of persuading people of their viewpoint (which hopefully is a worthy one; not e.g. denying a genocide)

The quote you presented I only found one instance of on the web which was here:

> I learned from my first daily newspaper editor, when I was pitching a story about improper personal favors dispensed by local government to a prominent landowner, that my suspicions meant nothing until I could prove it. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you know,” the late Joe Ellis, editor and publisher of the Clarksdale (Mississippi) Press-Register, admonished me.

https://virginiamercury.com/2021/02/01/dont-tell-me-what-you...

And even here the context around the quote is advocating for using true stories to persuade the readers of a certain viewpoint, that corrupt politicians are bad actually.

The context here of Mintpress News being a heavily biased journal—which they undoubtedly are—presenting a true story while trying to persuade readers that a genocidal army is doing other bad things. This is good journalism actually.

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