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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

> When a journal is biased... it is biased.

I would like to know which newspaper or journal is not biased.

This. Goddamn am I sick of people claiming bias on a news organization with tacit expectation that somewhere the platonic form of news information exists which is objectively true and unbiased.

It does not exist, it never will exist, and if Serenity has taught us anything, it's that you can't stop the signal, Mal.

I remembering learning at school, at about the age of 12, that all sources are biased.

Yes but, a new organization should at least _strive_ to be objective, even if the journalists have subconscious bias.

If you lean in to your biases you stop being news and start being entertainment.

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias" There's a difference between being objective and being unbiased.

wtf. Dictionary.com says "Objective most commonly means not influenced by an individual’s personal viewpoint—unbiased (or at least attempting to be unbiased). It’s often used to describe things like observations, decisions, or reports that are based on an unbiased analysis."

https://www.dictionary.com/e/subjective-vs-objective/

I'm not sure why you quoted it, but "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" is a joke you make at the expense of right wing people for not believing in reality.

What they mean is that if you approach some issues with "[no influence] by [your] individual personal viewpoint" you end up running into a leftist or slightly moderate viewpoint.

For example, take climate change. If you come at it looking only at the facts, you'll recognize we need more renewable energy and climate change poses a threat. Donald Trump, to contrast, in intending to put more money on oil and gas and remove subsidies for renewable energy.

Or, if you prefer, the economy. It's more or less undisputed that tariffs will hurt the GDP and overall economy of the US. However, Donald Trump claims tariffs will help the US economy.

Or, perhaps what the GOP has treasured most of all these past few years, the culture war. For example, gender-neutral bathrooms. From a neutral perspective, forcing trans people to use the bathroom of their assigned gender at birth will backfire tremendously. Instead of having trans women in women's restrooms, now you will have big burly and hairy trans men. Or look at gender affirming care, we have statistics about gender affirming care lowering the risk of suicide. But the right claims gender affirming care causes suicide and has a high regret rate.

Those are just a few examples, but if you look at popular conservative policies and then try to reason about them you kind of hit a wall.

By the way, not knowing the history of the reality thing I looked it up - it came from a Colbert joke about W Bush's popularity https://youtu.be/UwLjK9LFpeo

This may help

https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/

They all are. But they can do something like Firing Line, where people of opposing viewpoints are invited to debate. The editorial board can also hire a cross section of political views.

While possible it does not absolve the reader of ensuring that they are consuming information from a range of sources.

Journalism’s responsibility is to the truth, not to some perceived notion of fairness. The right in the US has been living in their own reality for a while now. Media does not owe liars any time of day.

Don’t take this to mean the democrats are the left and aren’t guilty of the same thing. They’re also right wing, and they lie, but to a lesser extent.

This lazy "everyone is bias, therefore bias doesn't exist" argument is nonsense, and is just FUD thrown about to cover for extremists when people point out their extremism.

Many news organizations pursue as unbiased a voice as they can. The Guardian is not one of them. Here's an organization attempting an objective rating of media bias, if you're actually interested in the topic: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart

That chart doesn't show any one organisation being 'less biased' than any other. It shows every organisation being biased in a different direction. Centrism is no 'less biased' than the far left or the far right.

The poster never implied that bias's ubiquity means bias doesn't exist.

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