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I still find some of the positions on that chart really debatable

 feeder wrote:

 Luciferian wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I think the impression you've gotten of Seb's position isn't accurate. I'll let him address it directly but it seems to me like you have similar opinions phrased from opposite angles. I can see how someone reading what Seb said without prior knowledge of his stance (from previous posting) would come to the conclusion you did. That's my impression though.

We do disagree on at least one point. He is saying that, due to some unspecified merit, certain news sources should be treated more leniently than others, and that for all intents and purposes, any claim of bias made against those news sources is due to cognitive dissonance as opposed to legitimate criticism.

The "unspecified merit" is including facts in the story. It's ok for a news article to include bias, it's nearly impossible to not have bias in reporting as journalists are people with opinions too.

I am actually being even more cynical. Yes, I am saying that all media is in some way telling you what you want to hear and buttressing you against outside information. Because they clearly have a rational, if short term, interest in doing so. I'm not buying the "some bias is OK, as long as it's my bias" bit. That, to me, is just the same kind of justification against critical thought he is making claims of bias out to be.

Some bias is ok, as long as the facts are in the story. Generally, NY Times, Wall St Journal and WaPo have bias and all or most of the facts. HuffPo and Fox have spin and some of the facts. Breitbart and InfoWars have propaganda and lies. This chart lays it out all very neatly.

Plus it kinda looks like the NCC-1701-D on there so that's pretty cool

NYT, CNN, and Washington Post have minimal bias? HAHAHAHAHAHA

Slate and Vox "skews liberal". Yeah, that chart is very friendly to the left side of the house.

I'm more curious how on earth CNN ended up lower on the "standards" line than MSNBC (and Faux News, but MSNBC is probably more obviously wrong without actually jumping into US politics). Huffpo I can concede, but only on the grounds that Huffpo is really broad, and you'll probably find stuff there that could fit just about anywhere on the chart. Hell why is any TV news media higher than "Basic AF"? I guess their print stuff is better than their TV content but it's still basic as feth XD

That chart is a few years old now. I am using it to illustrate the point, not present it as dogma.

I just remember when I first saw it on Dakka and literally no one agreed with the positions and the debate then became about the validity of the chart instead of the topic

 djones520 wrote:
Slate and Vox "skews liberal". Yeah, that chart is very friendly to the left side of the house.

But Slate is a a great indepth source of news! I was just on Slate...yea ok.

Important Slate topic today: Help! My Future Mother-in-Law Is Calling Me 30 to 50 Times a Day About My Wedding Dress.

 Frazzled wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
Slate and Vox "skews liberal". Yeah, that chart is very friendly to the left side of the house.

But Slate is a a great indepth source of news! I was just on Slate...yea ok.

Important Slate topic today: Help! My Future Mother-in-Law Is Calling Me 30 to 50 Times a Day About My Wedding Dress.

Yeah how Slate ended up that high is also beyond me. I could see the left-right axis as loosely valid, if only because there's not really any other "mainstream" than what is placed there, so its either have a massive void in the chart where nothing exists or simply accept reality and say "yeah this is the best 'least bias' we got" but I think the positions of the Top-Bottom axis for some of the sources aren't just wrong their wildly incorrect to the point I question if the person who made it knows what words mean

 djones520 wrote:
Slate and Vox "skews liberal". Yeah, that chart is very friendly to the left side of the house.

It clearly is. This is why I'm saying it's important to be critical of all media. Give me a news organization and I can show you examples of everything from manipulative wording and article structure to flat out lies in print. That includes NYT and WaPo. The bar for journalistic standards is at this time pathetically low across the board. The whole point of critical thought and analyses is to glean what viable information you can from any source, even if it's only that the source is trying to mislead you. I'm not a flat earther, but how can I debunk it as an idea if I don't even know the content of that idea? On the other side of the coin, sometimes conspiracies are real. How can you think you know what is true if you don't expose yourself to the information in the first place? Granted, the real conspiracies are not the ones being brayed about in dark corners of the internet by those who believe in lizard people, but magical thought is magical thought whether the claims are outrageous or plausible. In fact, the more clout and authority an organization has, the more it should be held to a strict standard. Because a plausible lie that accompanies an appeal to authority is so much easier and more comfortable to believe.

 Luciferian wrote:

It clearly is. This is why I'm saying it's important to be critical of all media. Give me a news organization and I can show you examples of everything from manipulative wording and article structure to flat out lies in print. That includes NYT and WaPo. The bar for journalistic standards is at this time pathetically low across the board. The whole point of critical thought and analyses is to glean what viable information you can from any source, even if it's only that the source is trying to mislead you. I'm not a flat earther, but how can I debunk it as an idea if I don't even know the content of that idea? On the other side of the coin, sometimes conspiracies are real. How can you think you know what is true if you don't expose yourself to the information in the first place? Granted, the real conspiracies are not the ones being brayed about in dark corners of the internet by those who believe in lizard people, but magical thought is magical thought whether the claims are outrageous or plausible.

Being critical of media is only one side of the coin. Being critical of yourself is the other. You're not going to delve too deep into presented info that aligns with your own views. Trying to catch yourself and take a deeper dive into the reputability of an article's sources is a constant effort.

In fact, the more clout and authority an organization has, the more it should be held to a strict standard. Because a plausible lie that accompanies an appeal to authority is so much easier and more comfortable to believe.

Can't agree more with that. It's annoying when a "reputable" source picks bad info up, then other news media run with it (especially when the story is hot) because the assumption is of course the original source has done their due diligence. A recent example is when the Anti-Defamation League picked up on the Parkland HS shooter's alleged political ties and everybody just trusted the ADL to be correct.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/16/florida-shooting-white-nationalists-415672

Some cursory research would have shown the 4chan thread popping up right after the news broke discussing how to implement the troll.

 avantgarde wrote:
Being critical of media is only one side of the coin. Being critical of yourself is the other. You're not going to delve too deep into presented info that aligns with your own views. Trying to catch yourself and take a deeper dive into the reputability of an article's sources is a constant effort.

I agree, I suppose that's ultimately what I was getting at. Any excuse not to examine your own beliefs is just that, an excuse. Now of course, that's something we're all bad at by our very nature as animals. But it's always something to aspire to.

 feeder wrote:

Some bias is ok, as long as the facts are in the story. Generally, NY Times, Wall St Journal and WaPo have bias and all or most of the facts. HuffPo and Fox have spin and some of the facts. Breitbart and InfoWars have propaganda and lies. This chart lays it out all very neatly.

Plus it kinda looks like the NCC-1701-D on there so that's pretty cool

The diagram had me convinced except for the top part of it. The Guardian, WSJ, and the Economist are the only ones on that list I'd agree belong there. I have a strange relationship with Vox where about 1 out of every 10-20 articles are absolutely incredible, and the rest might as well be cranked out by HuffPo. I also lament CSPAN not being present anywhere. They're one of the most detailed, unbiased, (and boring ) sources of news I've ever read.

I also feel like the Washington Post belongs significantly farther left than it's portrayed as being, but I'm probably nitpicking at this point. I'd have agreed where it is now BEFORE Sith Lord Bezos bought it, but you could see a significant drop in article quality astonishingly quickly after he took over.

Other things strike me as a little weird. I didn't think The Hill was necessarily that right-leaning (or trustworthy), but I've not read them incredibly thoroughly. US Uncut and The Blaize I kind of mentally lump into similar categories because they both tried really hard to spin the so-called Bernie Bros to their respective sides during that big thing that happened in the States a while ago that we're not allowed to talk about. In that sense, I felt like they actually kind of had similar stories with a weird common tertiary bias, but always went back to their own respective corners at the end of the day. One of those things where it was like, "Bernie is cool, but he'll never win. You know who's really evil? It's (Pepsi/Coke). I'm not saying you should vote for (Coke/Pepsi), but at all costs, we gotta prevent (Pepsi/Coke) from ever winning that popularity contest that we can't talk about at Dakkadakka."

I get where it looks like the NCC-1701-D though, and I'm 100% behind that part.

Afterthought disclaimer: I work for one of the corporations listed in the diagram. I'm trying not to have an opinion much beyond what I know having just read some of the other publications listed. And FWIW, I think my employer's position in the diagram is spot on.

 daedalus wrote:

I also feel like the Washington Post belongs significantly farther left than it's portrayed as being, but I'm probably nitpicking at this point. I'd have agreed where it is now BEFORE Sith Lord Bezos bought it, but you could see a significant drop in article quality astonishingly quickly after he took over.

Even setting political bias aside, the Washington Post has a financial interest in the CIA via Bezos. That's an organization which has an unknown budget dedicated to the clandestine dissemination of propaganda, to the point where they were found placing 50 assets as journalists and media officials in this country, some of whom are still active and respected journalists. These are the sources that sell us on wars and foreign policy. I'm sure everyone remembers another unmentionable event predicated on the existence of certain phantom objects the media assured us were real. Or tangentially related legislation that basically struck the 4th amendment out of the Constitution, the consequences of which are unimaginably vast but not something you will ever really hear about in mainstream media. You can trace the history of media manipulation in terms of foreign policy back over a hundred years, easily.

Of course, the CIA has publicly claimed that it ceased using its contacts in the domestic media and they really promise they won't ever do anything like that ever again, but it takes a greater leap of the imagination to believe that than the alternative. Especially when they have multi-million dollar contracts with the owner of one of the largest news organizations in the country. The amount of information we're not given about the consequences of our foreign policy is, at the least least, something that should give anyone pause when considering the reliability of our legacy media. The crazy thing to me is that this used to be a pretty leftie position you'd expect to hear from Chomsky types. Now, with no small thanks due to the media itself, it's either just not bought up or dismissed as right-wing apologia.

Just to add one more layer to the puzzle of this discussion - NYT, Washington Post and The Guardian are known in Poland mostly because they notoriously publish VERY biased reprints/guest articles about our internal affairs written by journalists from titles which in polish equivalent of this chart would be to the lower left from HuffPost (which are then in turn reprinted in those very polish titles as "world press reactions"). So just be aware, that while you may have accurate view about "left-right" skew on local politics that does not automatically mean, that your knowledge about global issues is at the same level. For those who are sceptical about this just read into current Polish-Israeli issue in those tites (this is pretty much the most riduculous pre-elections "media stunt" I saw in decades).

And to add a word on "be critical of all media" - my wife works in media analysis here in Poland, her bread and butter is to know ALL the angles, ALL the time (they follow and analyse thousands of sources, her typical report is based on four-five digit numbers of published entries on any given subject) and there is NO SINGLE title which might be called "universally unbiased". "Arsenal" of manipulation techniques used even in titles belonging "somewhere in the middle" of such charts is still huge and widely used and usually even more dangerous than straightforward "warning light" propaganda. Her day-to-day work is very often about tracing of cumulative disinformation that arises on a path from source (be it press agency news snippet or particular twitter or anything else)... Conclusion from her line of work is pretty singular - if you want to be really unbiased and well informed you pretty much have to be in her line of work and have acces to similiar mass data analysis tools as her line of work provides.

 Luciferian wrote:
You're pretty much saying that if, as customers, people take issue with slanted or biased reporting and seek out alternative sources which they believe can serve them better, they're wrong and they should just suck it up and consume the shoddy journalism because that's what's "good for them" in your opinion. Journalists and news organizations don't have any responsibility for transparency and honest reporting? The onus is not on them as profit-seeking companies to retain their customer base by responding to its needs? They aren't accountable for improving the quality of their product? Nope, it's the consumer's fault for being critical. Outstanding.

I'm not saying that. Your interpretation of my post is utter junk.

What I am saying is that consumers are at fault, because the way in which they critique journalism is bad. Very few will critique articles on their accuracy and completeness. Far more critique articles on whether they support the reader's pre-existing bias. When an article doesn't share the reader's bias, the reader will complain the article is biased. This is both ironic, and the cause of much of the problem with journalism.

This is the era of clickbait "journalism". We're not talking about morally righteous public services with the interests of the people at heart, we're talking about multi-million dollar corporations that have a vested financial interest in current events, as well as financial incentives to be as salacious and sensationalist as possible. We're talking about the business model of viral outrage and tribal signaling. You can take two news organizations from different perspectives, give them the same exact sources and facts to report on, and you're going to get two radically different interpretations of events, neither of which is going to be fully supported by the facts.

I tried to avoid this part of your argument earlier, to stay focused on the actual discussion, but it's becoming obvious your understanding of modern journalism is the big stumbling block. The idea that all of a sudden today we've got an emphasis on sensationalism is wildly ignorant. There's always been sensationalism, and there always will. Because, as you said yourself, media companies are profit-seeking companies who seek to retain their customer base by responding to its needs. Which means the media sensationalizes, it always and it always will.

That isn't great, and it'd be nice if more consumers were aware of this and reacted against it, but in itself it isn't a disastrous situation, as long as that sensationalism is at some level still held to some level of objective fact, even after the event.


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 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
So sebster posits that people treat all media the same by equating all levels of bias with one another and you attempt to rebut his point by treating all media the same by equating all levels of bias with one another. Good job?

Man, I used so many words to write an answer, and then in a single sentence you said it perfectly. Nicely done


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 Luciferian wrote:
What? His argument conflates all criticism of bias with a denial of the facts, and very conveniently enshrines his own bias as unassailable.

No, that is not my criticism. Here are the actual words I used to describe the problem;
"The effect of this is people reject stories simply because they're telling them something they don't want to hear because 'its biased', rather than trying to work out if its actually true or not."

Stop ignoring the words I am writing so you can instead complain about a fantasy version of my point. It is wasting everyone's time.


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 Luciferian wrote:
We do disagree on at least one point. He is saying that, due to some unspecified merit, certain news sources should be treated more leniently than others, and that for all intents and purposes, any claim of bias made against those news sources is due to cognitive dissonance as opposed to legitimate criticism.

I'm not saying that. I am saying that every piece of writing is biased, and it's silly to pretend otherwise and reject something just because it is biased. What should cause people to reject a piece of writing are factual errors and omissions of important information.

 sebster wrote:


I'm not saying that. Your interpretation of my post is utter junk.

What I am saying is that consumers are at fault, because the way in which they critique journalism is bad. Very few will critique articles on their accuracy and completeness. Far more critique articles on whether they support the reader's pre-existing bias. When an article doesn't share the reader's bias, the reader will complain the article is biased. This is both ironic, and the cause of much of the problem with journalism.

Right, it's the consumer's fault that journalism is bad, not the journalist's, and for all intents and purposes criticism of bias is illegitimate. We already got that. Speaking of shoddy reporting, do you have any kind of source for that claim, by the way?

I tried to avoid this part of your argument earlier, to stay focused on the actual discussion, but it's becoming obvious your understanding of modern journalism is the big stumbling block. The idea that all of a sudden today we've got an emphasis on sensationalism is wildly ignorant. There's always been sensationalism, and there always will. Because, as you said yourself, media companies are profit-seeking companies who seek to retain their customer base by responding to its needs. Which means the media sensationalizes, it always and it always will.

So I'm right, but I'm wildly ignorant? You have any other cute asides you want to throw at me? Before you were saying that treating all media the same is this huge cognitive faux-pas that is ruining journalism, but now you're trying to claim that journalism in the age of the internet is exactly the same as it was in the day of the printing press? You don't think that there are perhaps some different market pressures which incentivize different behaviors? Nah, you're right, I'm the one whose understanding of modern journalism is a big stumbling block.

I like how you singled out two sentences from everything I've said, and responded to each with an insult followed by an unsupported generalization. You'd make a great journalist!

 Frazzled wrote:
NYT, CNN, and Washington Post have minimal bias? HAHAHAHAHAHA

You should note that graphic has been around for possibly 7 or 8 years now, since Breitbart etc. started to be noticed as filling a space even further to right of FOX News. So it's definitions are a little out of date. And yeah, recently WaPo has shifted leftward, really to take a position in opposition to Trump and the media orgs that overtly support him.

However, your complaints about the other two news organisations are hollow, and only show your own bias (and how your bias feeds your understanding of media orgs, reinforcing your bias, exactly as I said to you earlier in this thread).

CNN isn't biased because it doesn't have a viewpoint, because it doesn't have any real interest in news at all. In order to give someone a biased version of events, you would have to actually be telling someone something at all.

The NYT is so intent on both sides it bends over backwards to sacrifice actual news just to appeal to every market segment. During the 2016 election the paper directed 20 journalists to investigate Trump's background, and how many to investigate Clinton? 20. Because balance. It didn't matter who had more scandals or bigger scandals, its decision was entirely based on neutrality. Right now it has opinion writers like the climate change denier Bret Stephens and Erik Prince, the Blackwater guy who's tied to Trump in all the money under the table kind of ways. It gives these kinds of people op ed space simply because it wants 'balance'.


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 LordofHats wrote:
I'm more curious how on earth CNN ended up lower on the "standards" line than MSNBC

Because CNN is a mindnumbing exercise in politics treated as sport, that will leave the audience far dumber just for hearing it. Not because 'bias', but because getting a half dozen pundits to 'debate' an issue just by going to each in turn and having them spew a packaged line is an utter waste of time. It's also a waste of talent, because there's a few people on CNN who don't suck, and could do good work if they were at a news organisation that worried just a little about reporting actual news.

 Luciferian wrote:

 sebster wrote:


I'm not saying that. Your interpretation of my post is utter junk.

What I am saying is that consumers are at fault, because the way in which they critique journalism is bad. Very few will critique articles on their accuracy and completeness. Far more critique articles on whether they support the reader's pre-existing bias. When an article doesn't share the reader's bias, the reader will complain the article is biased. This is both ironic, and the cause of much of the problem with journalism.

Right, it's the consumer's fault that journalism is bad, not the journalist's, and for all intents and purposes criticism of bias is illegitimate. We already got that. Speaking of shoddy reporting, do you have any kind of source for that claim, by the way?

If he did, would you accept it at face value?

His premise is pretty sound to me, even if he's being blunt about it. Ultimately, consumers control what forms of media is presented to them. This is a symbiotic relationship with your clickbait headlines that sell sell sell: The outlets live or die by what the consumers consume, so they set their crap to focus on the emotional reaction, rather than the rational one. Witness your garbage article that shows you what an idiot "the other guy" is, or establishes what a "smart-guy" you are. It's a case of the outlets building a better skinner box, and the consumers just keep doubletapping that Pavlovian response as hard as they can. What the feth do you expect at that point?

Were articles evaluated upon the merit of their completeness and depth, that effect wouldn't be immediately present, but absolutely almost no one* processes news that way.

* I actually know one guy who does handle news this way. He's literally probably the smartest person I have ever met, but he's utterly dysfunctional in real life. Really nice guy too, all things considered. I don't like to bandy the autism label around, but I think he's actually on the spectrum somewhere.

 LordofHats wrote:
Yeah how Slate ended up that high is also beyond me. I could see the left-right axis as loosely valid, if only because there's not really any other "mainstream" than what is placed there, so its either have a massive void in the chart where nothing exists or simply accept reality and say "yeah this is the best 'least bias' we got" but I think the positions of the Top-Bottom axis for some of the sources aren't just wrong their wildly incorrect to the point I question if the person who made it knows what words mean

Slate spams a lot of junk stories. But it also does a lot of long form investigative journalism. I guess in making these subjective assessments whoever made this chart made the decision to judge just the serious reporting, and not worry if the media site has a lot of crap stories made for circulation. Funnily enough by that standard Buzzfeed should be on there and ranked quite well, as in amidst the 'which Hogwart's character are you?' junk they also have a pretty decent investigative journalism team.

I have more of a problem with Slate as just slightly to the left, because from my reading of their site I think the most neutral pieces I've read have been centre left, with most to the left of that, and some being close to left wing advocacy. They certainly shouldn't be in the same space as The Atlantic.


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 daedalus wrote:
I also feel like the Washington Post belongs significantly farther left than it's portrayed as being, but I'm probably nitpicking at this point. I'd have agreed where it is now BEFORE Sith Lord Bezos bought it, but you could see a significant drop in article quality astonishingly quickly after he took over.

Honestly, this is something people talk about a lot, and I really think it is people creating a narrative to suit their assumptions. WaPo before and after Bezos is the same. You can tell this because Bezos made literally not one change to the senior editorial staff of the paper. The guy is completely hands off on the running of the paper.

But I think there's been a natural tendency to fantasize about what the Washington Post used to be, before it was bought by one stupidly rich man. Except, you know, before Bezos it was privately owned by the Graham family, who were also stupidly rich. And while the paper has always done good work, it's never been perfect, because its a major paper, employing thousands of writers with daily printing deadlines.

The only change we've seen has come more recently, and that's in the WaPo taking up a position in pretty stark opposition to the Trump presidency. And that's probably more opportunism than anything - there's a lot of good stories to write about the way this president is going about things.


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Other things strike me as a little weird. I didn't think The Hill was necessarily that right-leaning (or trustworthy), but I've not read them incredibly thoroughly.

The Hill is a weird one, because its pieces are typically very short, and focused on breaking news so there's little room for bias in the report's themselves. But focusing on Washtington politics, most of their story selections come through leaks and government screw ups. So if this diagram was first made during the Obama presidency (which I think we all believe is the case?), I can see The Hill being designated right leaning, as it would have been more negative stories on Obama's presidency than on anything else. But now Trump's in the Whitehouse their stories are largely about Trump, so technically The Hill should shift to the left.

 LordofHats wrote:
I still find some of the positions on that chart really debatable

Debatable?

It's outright lunacy man...

 Luciferian wrote:
Right, it's the consumer's fault that journalism is bad, not the journalist's, and for all intents and purposes criticism of bias is illegitimate. We already got that.

Look, its very simple. If consumers purchased hamburgers based entirely on the size of the burger with no regards for its taste, or other factors like it not being 50% sawdust, then when someone noticed that almost all hamburgers in the city were enormous, but tasted awful and were mostly made of sawdust, then it would be pretty obvious that the reason the burgers are like that is because that's what customers are demanding.

This is no different.

Speaking of shoddy reporting, do you have any kind of source for that claim, by the way?

Wha? You claim, unsourced, that journalism had suddenly got worse because clickbait. I respond that its never been that good. I need a source, but you didn't. Bleh.

So I'm right, but I'm wildly ignorant?

Mostly the latter.

You have any other cute asides you want to throw at me?

After that last one, no I think I'm done.

Before you were saying that treating all media the same is this huge cognitive faux-pas that is ruining journalism, but now you're trying to claim that journalism in the age of the internet is exactly the same as it was in the day of the printing press?

No, I'm explaining to you that its more similar than it is different. It isn't exactly the same, but the differences are not as extreme as you understand, nor are they exactly as you understand them. Really, the biggest shift has been from single city, centrist papers to global papers with distinct voices. A reader in LA would once have read the LA Times, now a guy in St Louis might be reading LA Times, while the guy in LA has shifted to WaPo or Breitbart, or maybe even The Daily Mail or The Guardian. That makes it a different news environment, but to claim that now suddenly it is a clickbait environment for the first time ever was a terrible take from you.

As to my statement that treating all media the same is a mistake, its just true. Some media orgs have higher journalistic standards than others. It is a basic reality that orgs like Act Blue or Breitbart have strong political slants to their pieces, and regularly include dubious or just plain false factual statements. In contrast sites like WaPo or the WSJ may still have viewpoints (or bias, if you will), but their stories have reliable factual statements, and generally include most pertinent factors (though WSJ less so since Murdoch bought it). No site should be treated as holy writ, but they shouldn't also be treated identically.

 sebster wrote:

 daedalus wrote:
I also feel like the Washington Post belongs significantly farther left than it's portrayed as being, but I'm probably nitpicking at this point. I'd have agreed where it is now BEFORE Sith Lord Bezos bought it, but you could see a significant drop in article quality astonishingly quickly after he took over.

Honestly, this is something people talk about a lot, and I really think it is people creating a narrative to suit their assumptions. WaPo before and after Bezos is the same. You can tell this because Bezos made literally not one change to the senior editorial staff of the paper. The guy is completely hands off on the running of the paper.

But I think there's been a natural tendency to fantasize about what the Washington Post used to be, before it was bought by one stupidly rich man. Except, you know, before Bezos it was privately owned by the Graham family, who were also stupidly rich. And while the paper has always done good work, it's never been perfect, because its a major paper, employing thousands of writers with daily printing deadlines.

The only change we've seen has come more recently, and that's in the WaPo taking up a position in pretty stark opposition to the Trump presidency. And that's probably more opportunism than anything - there's a lot of good stories to write about the way this president is going about things.

My only defence is that I think I was the last one to the party to notice that Wapo got bought out, but I could probably go back and find the article when I noticed the shift. Of course, something something cognitive bias and all that. So in this case I'll shrug and accept that you're right on it, even though first instinct tells me something is wrong there. Maybe I'll go back and try to read it objectively tomorrow and see if it doesn't seem more reasonable than I recall. Could be, post-that US based thing we don't talk about? No clue.

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Other things strike me as a little weird. I didn't think The Hill was necessarily that right-leaning (or trustworthy), but I've not read them incredibly thoroughly.

The Hill is a weird one, because its pieces are typically very short, and focused on breaking news so there's little room for bias in the report's themselves. But focusing on Washtington politics, most of their story selections come through leaks and government screw ups. So if this diagram was first made during the Obama presidency (which I think we all believe is the case?), I can see The Hill being designated right leaning, as it would have been more negative stories on Obama's presidency than on anything else. But now Trump's in the Whitehouse their stories are largely about Trump, so technically The Hill should shift to the left.

 daedalus wrote:

If he did, would you accept it at face value?

His premise is pretty sound to me, even if he's being blunt about it. Ultimately, consumers control what forms of media is presented to them. This is a symbiotic relationship with your clickbait headlines that sell sell sell: The outlets live or die by what the consumers consume, so they set their crap to focus on the emotional reaction, rather than the rational one. Witness your garbage article that shows you what an idiot "the other guy" is, or establishes what a "smart-guy" you are. It's a case of the outlets building a better skinner box, and the consumers just keep doubletapping that Pavlovian response as hard as they can. What the feth do you expect at that point?

Were articles evaluated upon the merit of their completeness and depth, that effect wouldn't be immediately present, but absolutely almost no one* processes news that way.

* I actually know one guy who does handle news this way. He's literally probably the smartest person I have ever met, but he's utterly dysfunctional in real life. Really nice guy too, all things considered. I don't like to bandy the autism label around, but I think he's actually on the spectrum somewhere.

Would I accept it at face value? Probably not, because that's not the kind of person I am. If his source were an article, I would try to find the bias in the article. Which wouldn't be very hard considering that a journalist working for a major news organization has a pretty big interest in defending their appearance. If the source were a study, I would look into its methodology and where it had been published. I try not to accept anything at face value, and part of applying critical thought to the analyses of media is, unquestionably, accounting for bias. Saying that bias doesn't matter at all and that being critical of it is a waste of time or simply a defense mechanism basically precludes critical analysis of media. Note that I'm not saying that one should stop at the detection of bias and use it as an excuse to disregard any possibly truthful information they didn't want to contend with.

I totally agree about the state of our 24 hour news cycle, and that's part of my point. You can go through a news cycle where every major outlet is reporting on the exact same story, citing the exact same sources, yet drawing drastically different conclusions in order to affirm the tendencies of their audiences toward self-identification. They can all be reporting on the same facts. Often, the only relevant difference between one news organization and the next on any given story is their bias. Take Breitbart for example. They don't even really do their own journalism, they just aggregate content and spin it in their own light. From what I've seen, a vast majority of their content comes directly from legacy media organizations. In that case, they're reporting on exactly the same information, but they're seen as less reliable. Why? Their bias. Their spin. You know that they are pushing a subjective interpretation of events, even if their content contains exactly the same objective information. This hypothetical situation where only some news organizations publish falsehoods and misleading content, and the vaunted few are biased but must be accepted because they're the only ones who publish facts, just doesn't exist.

My other problem with what he is saying, is that it's just too convenient as a defense of bias and poor journalistic standards from the right places. Legacy media organizations are feeling the pain right now. People are canceling their subscriptions to papers and cable outlets. Even established blogs and digital media sites are having issues. Just like the internet came for music, retail, film and TV, it is coming for the legacy media. Any random schmuck on YouTube can do exactly the same thing as your average journalist, more efficiently, for little to no money, and possibly reach an even greater audience. People are distrusting the news because they know for a fact it is biased, and they are finding alternatives. The result is a click bait weapons race as legacy media tries desperately to retain its audience share by any means necessary. Of course they are going to push the narrative that their bias is OK, because #pizzagate. But that's an extremely reductive double standard that really isn't based on much except a plea to respect their authority as "experts" with now useless degrees hanging in their offices. So we have a chicken and an egg here. Is it the consumers fault that they receive bad reporting because they are rejecting the main stream media? Or is it the main stream media's fault for doing a bad job and being reduced to competing with trolls and bloggers?


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 sebster wrote:
. In contrast sites like WaPo or the WSJ may still have viewpoints (or bias, if you will), but their stories have reliable factual statements, and generally include most pertinent factors (though WSJ less so since Murdoch bought it). No site should be treated as holy writ, but they shouldn't also be treated identically.

Thing is, that's demonstrably false. WaPo publishes false information quite often, whether it's intentional or not. Both WaPo and the NYT regularly publish stories with no verifiable sources whatsoever. And when they do it, everyone else picks it up and runs with it. Most of the other outlets are simply reporting on what they say and adding their own spin to it.

 daedalus wrote:
My only defence is that I think I was the last one to the party to notice that Wapo got bought out, but I could probably go back and find the article when I noticed the shift. Of course, something something cognitive bias and all that. So in this case I'll shrug and accept that you're right on it, even though first instinct tells me something is wrong there. Maybe I'll go back and try to read it objectively tomorrow and see if it doesn't seem more reasonable than I recall. Could be, post-that US based thing we don't talk about? No clue.

Cool. And I don't mean to claim authority on this. WaPo is not something I read all the time. In fact I don't even hit the paywall limit that often. But from my observation before the Bezos buy out is the paper was okay, and afterwards its been okay.

Honestly I think Bezos political motivations in buying the paper have been well overstated. Bezos leans left, but he's not a huge activist, the guy's primary motivation is expanding Amazon. And one of Bezos primary methods of expansion is buying operations that he can leverage with Amazon's existing assets - Kindle and WaPo have a lot of synchronicity.

Uurgh, Bezos. He made me say 'synchronicity'.

They were interesting, because I felt like a lot of their stuff was in that category that I'd put US Uncut and The Blaze in that it seemed to cater to the Bernie Bros, but the difference was (and in this I agree) that it seems like it was mostly oriented around making the current administration look bad, almost with the intent of whomever that might happen to be at the time. Is it still? I stopped reading news outside of what I have to for work because it was noticeably negatively affecting my mental health. That last sentence is meant in a more serious tone than most people usually expect.

I have no idea what US Uncut is. Never even heard of it. The Blaze is Glenn Beck's outfit, they're certianly on the far right, but unreliable doesn't really explain The Blaze. I mean, the Daily Caller is far right and unreliable, so it gets put next to The Blaze. But they're very different, because The Blaze isn't so much unreliable as just plain fething nuts. There needs to almost be a third axis, for batshittiness.

We have that. We call it the Whopper. You can get one at any Burger King and I understand that they have a 2 for $6 deal going on.

We have Whoppers as well. We don't have Burger King, instead we have these places called Hungry Jacks, and they have basically everything a Burger King has. Hungry Jacks have deal with Burger King to pay a fee, but they don't use the Burger King name. Its weird.


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 Luciferian wrote:
Thing is, that's demonstrably false. WaPo publishes false information quite often, whether it's intentional or not. Both WaPo and the NYT regularly publish stories with no verifiable sources whatsoever. And when they do it, everyone else picks it up and runs with it. Most of the other outlets are simply reporting on what they say and adding their own spin to it.

Oh for feth's sake. Yes, WaPo will make mistakes. Every paper has a retractions section, and I've never seen it blank. Thousands of employees working to daily deadlines mean mistakes happen. But there remains a difference between media orgs making mistakes, because they are not perfect institutions, and media orgs making false statements because they are more interested in selling a conclusion than in getting the facts straight.

Your claim that articles are posted with no verifiable sources is just silly. Journalism uses hidden sources. This has always been a major part of journalism, and complaining about is goofy. Deepthroat was 'not a verifiable source'. This does mean, potentially, a journalist could make up a source and claim they're anonymous, and that's where the paper's editorial standards come in to play, and where the reader should apply judgement.

 sebster wrote:

Oh for feth's sake. Yes, WaPo will make mistakes. Every paper has a retractions section, and I've never seen it blank. Thousands of employees working to daily deadlines mean mistakes happen. But there remains a difference between media orgs making mistakes, because they are not perfect institutions, and media orgs making false statements because they are more interested in selling a conclusion than in getting the facts straight.

WMD's were not a "mistake". The fantastical hacking of the power grid was not a "mistake". ProporNot was not a "mistake". They were, at best, catastrophic failures of the editorial process. Using figurative language that is meant precisely to halt a critical analysis of a news item and engender bias in the reader is not a mistake. Leading with a paragraph that is intentionally constructed to direct the reader toward a desired conclusion, only to reveal at the bottom of the article that that conclusion is totally unsupported by the facts, is not a mistake. It is a cynical attempt to divert away from facts even as they are presented.

Your claim that articles are posted with no verifiable sources is just silly. Journalism uses hidden sources. This has always been a major part of journalism, and complaining about is goofy. Deepthroat was 'not a verifiable source'. This does mean, potentially, a journalist could make up a source and claim they're anonymous, and that's where the paper's editorial standards come in to play, and where the reader should apply judgement.

Apply judgment, like questioning the potential bias of the piece?

I know so many people that takes Info-Wars as some kind of truth bible. They are so intelligent, and the rest of us are so blind.

But at the same time they are 4chaners (Or the hispanic world's equivalent of 4chan, Forocoches) so... yeah.

 Galas wrote:
I know so many people that takes Info-Wars as some kind of truth bible. They are so intelligent, and the rest of us are so blind.

But at the same time they are 4chaners (Or the hispanic world's equivalent of 4chan, Forocoches) so... yeah.

I don't personally know anyone who takes Info-Wars seriously. I thought the consensus was that it's, at the very least, tongue in cheek infotainment.

The thing is, even Alex Jones' reporting is largely based on facts. They are just then wildly extrapolated and sensationalized to the nth degree. If you check the sources behind an Info-Wars report, chances are the story is there, but it's just much more mundane and innocuous than they're making it out to be. Unfortunately, even the most reputable news sources are doing the same thing that Alex Jones is, just to a less conspicuous degree. If your claim to legitimacy is that you're less sensational than Alex Jones, you've got problems.

 Luciferian wrote:
WMD's were not a "mistake". The fantastical hacking of the power grid was not a "mistake". ProporNot was not a "mistake"

Unless you want to claim that WaPo published those stories knowing they were false, but suited some financial or political interest, then yes, they were mistakes. I believe each instance listed had a subsequent retraction or clarification.

They were, at best, catastrophic failures of the editorial process.

That would be a more dramatic way of saying 'mistake'.

Apply judgment, like questioning the potential bias of the piece?

No. For feth's sake, we've been over this. You review the facts and completeness of the story. So, for instance, if NYT's Maggie Haberman ran a story with a Trump inside staffer leaking something critical of the Trump administration, if a person just thought 'oh NYT is left wing and its attacking Trump therefore bias therefore ignore the story'... that person would be an idiot.

Good and sensible judgement would be to note that Haberman has a weird but highly productive relationship with the Trump administration that's given her a lot of leaked info, and then conclude this leak is genuine. But then it would also be important to note that most of the leaks Haberman has gotten are the result of infighting within the Trump campaign, often but not always trying to advance the Jared/Ivanka position, and concluding this leak is part of a political strategy and therefore while the leak is genuine and the story presented is factual, it is probably also a highly political take on the issue and not the complete story.

Get the difference? Ready to move on now?


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 Luciferian wrote:
I don't personally know anyone who takes Info-Wars seriously. I thought the consensus was that it's, at the very least, tongue in cheek infotainment.

No, it isn't.

The thing is, even Alex Jones' reporting is largely based on facts.

No, it isn't.

Unfortunately, even the most reputable news sources are doing the same thing that Alex Jones is, just to a less conspicuous degree. If your claim to legitimacy is that you're less sensational than Alex Jones, you've got problems.

No, and this is the exact brain mush nonsense that results from thinking the only problem is 'bias'. Newspapers that have made some mistakes and retracted them are not the same thing as liars selling paranoid conspiracy fantasies.

One other detail to keep in mind about that above chart, other than NPR, all of them are owned and run by four conclomorates. Some of them on seemingly polar ends of the political spectrum.

 Luciferian wrote:
The thing is, even Alex Jones' reporting is largely based on facts.

I find it interesting that just a page ago I had real respect for your position, which has continually been eroded down to nil. I quote this line in particular because I can't take someone seriously if they believe this. There isn't even a place to start on how false that statement is. I also see double irony in extolling the virtue of criticizing bias while showing a lack of such for your own, and also entirely proving Seb's point of how that leads to ridiculous viewpoints.