Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

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There is such a thing as objective truth. Note that NPR's former head doesn't believe that [1]. Anyway, most people in Britain disagree that the BBC does its best to report it. Here's a simple reality check: how does the BBC describe right wing politicians? Dame Andrea Jenkyns DBE is a former Tory MP, government minister and campaigner for Brexit. She has a degree in economics, spent 20 years in Parliament and she just won mayorship of Greater Lincolnshire. This is the headline the BBC went with:

"Reform UK's Andrea Jenkyns is the new mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, marking a return to politics for the former Gregg's worker and Miss UK finalist"

She's 50 but the BBC's audience hears about what she did as a teenage girl. It's not an isolated incident. Nobody serious tries to argue the BBC is neutral, fair or objective anymore. Reform is the highest polling party in Britain, it's awful to make all those voters pay money to an organization that openly hates them.

> Did you know that Fox didn't even report the stock market drop after liberation day? They just pretended it wasn't happening!

Yes they did:

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6370983289112 "Stock markets crashing in response to tariff announcement"

[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/04/17/npr_ceo_k...

You can always find examples. But it's a question of frequency. I can turn on Fox and in 1 second hear a falsehood. The key is the process ... NPR, BBC, PBS always have to show their sources and are required to have verification of sources. That's how news used to work, but now it doesn't in the 24-hour infotainment cycle. The fact that these public sources must have 2 sources means 99% of what they report is accurate. And when they get it wrong, they print retractions. Until we get back to these journalistic ethics, we will have a public that believes black is white. Somebody must like that.

How does showing sources equate to correctness? If you use false or biased sources then the problem still exists yes?

Everything comes down to statistics. There are no perfect solutions. But showing multiple sources reduces the obvious errors to an error margin that ensures most people are well-informed. And they have to be real, verified sources, not facebook posts or tweets.

So if those multiple sources are all biased, like news media tends to be, then really you’re masquerading as having balanced sources that prove your point yet they’re all biased.

Right?

It's called journalistic ethics. Look it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_ethics_in_media https://www.npr.org/ethics https://www.pbs.org/standards/accuracy/ https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/reports/policies/codeofcondu...

You need to double check all your beliefs about the media before continuing this thread. There's no nice way to say this, but your posts have been a stream of totally made up "facts" that are making this discussion worse.

- You claimed Fox never reported on the stock market crash, something easily disproved with a five second web search.

- You claimed having two sources yields 99% accuracy, a made up number.

- You claimed NPR, BBC and PBS have to show their sources, although they regularly report single-sourced or anonymously sourced stories.

- You claim you can hear a falsehood within one second of turning on Fox.

You're in the habit of routinely inventing numbers whilst criticizing others for perceived failures to be accurate. Given you're talking about the importance of an informed populace that's ironic and embarrassing.

So you are stating flatly that Fox has the same journalistic ethics as NPR and BBC? Really? That's your argument? "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears." - Orwell.

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