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Comment by pm90 | Hacker News Reader

To a certain extent this is a result of living in a media ecosystem where most of the population doesn’t actually see an unbiased reporting of facts but whatever is shown to them by certain right wing news networks. But I do agree at some point people need to take responsibility for their information diet.

Fwiw media manipulation of American opinion isn’t new, its been a huge part of how America works since at least the Spanish American war of 1896.

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Bias is what exists on the left.

Monopoly and capture is what happened to the right. Theres a reason republicans march and Dems debate.

The republican strategists build this advantage over decades, it’s not the work of a single term. It’s a captured market of ideas, tariffs if you will. No competition from actual debates.

That’s why you can sell contradictory ideas within hours of each other, and never be called out for it. It’s why you can sell debates on Tan suits or prop up bogeymen, and never deal with debate.

This is news media. Eventually Fox wasn’t the sole juggernaut, and the techniques got adopted for online debates.

It’s been so wildly successful in building a reliable political voting bloc, that every political party in the world took notes.

There is no such thing as unbiased reporting of facts. People not understanding that, and the fact that there is nothing inherently wrong with bias, is a big part of the problem.

Objective reality, it exists.

Telling your audience obviously false / anti-factual lies, without any regard for fact checking, is not just "biased reporting". And it is inherently wrong, malevolent, evil.

Anyway, I'm amazed each time I hear right wingers who did not get the joke seemingly complaining about how Reality has a left leaning political bias...

Lying is not the same as bias. That is the problem, people often conflate the two.

Is that a fact?

Presumably yes but subject to benign bias.

You can be biased but adopt a systematic methodology and a deontology system, both of which help journalists mitigate their bias and produce quality reporting.

The big issue with the current news ecosystem and social media is their complete disregard for this methodology. By discarding the journalistic methodology, they make themselves propagandists, not journalists.

What if there is something inherently wrong with bias, but there is also no possibility to solve it. I see people operating under the idea that if there is something inherently wrong, then there must exist some solution to that inherent wrongness. What if the underlying issue is that there are flaws in humans that cannot be fixed and any attempt to manage is going to still leave some victims of the issue unprotected?

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