Originally posted by: sapiens74
Originally posted by: PaperclipGod
Originally posted by: n yusef
Originally posted by: sandorski
"News" is non-Partisan. Editorials are another matter.
That's not necessarily correct. Bias manifests in the selection of news stories, when selecting people to interview, the tone and coded language used when reporting, and probably other ways that do not immediately come to mind.
The Natalee Holloway case was tragic, but there are millions of stories of young women kidnapped and possibly murdered. Her story was chosen from the rest because of her appearance, race and social class. There is a segment on a late-night talk show where people on the streets of New York are interviewed about current events. For the sake of entertainment, and to convey a message (Americans are ignorant), the interviews almost always are of people saying stupid things. We cannot know how many people were interviewed before an idiot was found. It could be fifty, or it could have been on the first try. When MSNBC covers the Tea Parties, they do so jokingly and dismissively. I'll be honest, the Tea Parties are funny to me, but I expect a news provider to take them seriously and provide a reasonably fair report of them. Still, I do not think that MSNBC reporters said anything
incorrect or
slanderous.
You can present the facts while maintaining a very strong bias.
I definitely agree with you, here. It has become impossible to find a news report that simply describes
what happened. The reporter invariably throws in his/her own musings on the topic, suggested implications, or general sentiments. Even the style of fact reporting, as you point out, can have a bias.
Ideally, IMO, the reader shouldn't even be able to differentiate one reporter/author from another when reading the news. Reported news shouldn't have personality, it should have raw facts.
Maybe you and I should start a news website? YusufReport.com?
I agree just the facts. I can turn to CNN/MSNBC and FOX for conjecture
To be somewhat Contrarian, I think most people are unable to analyze the facts on most stories very well, and good-faith, quality commentary is *essential* to understanding news.
I think it's an egoistic position to pretend that we're all masters of the issues if just handed the facts, and that all the commentary is useless blather intended to deceive.
That way is the way of fools, in my opinion, who delude themselves (not aiming that comment at anyone here, speaking generally).
If I lay out the facts, for example, on anything from what happened to Bear-Sterns to the war in Serbia to 'Clean Coal', al that will happen is that many people will apply them to their pre-existing ideologies and speculations and come up with contradictory and often wrong conclusions. 'But what role did the long-time personal battle between former Goldman -Sachs CEO enry Paulson and the abrasive, stubborn CEO of Bear-Sterns play in the policy making?' Sorry, not a word, that's not a hard and cold fact, however important.
All you get are the dates and the amounts and the words in the press releases, the hard facts, now go figure the story out.
In short, in my opinion, the news is crippled without recognizing that context is important and context requires taking sides on certain assumptions.
In stories on our policy in Pakistan, do we really need every reference to equally represent Al Queda's view as much as anyone else's, being completely neutral?
The fact is, we can't get critical truths in our stories now, and any desire to try to make stories 'just the facts' will do nothing but have the media pretending to do that while in fact offering evern more biased 'news' but with the claim that it's neutral, not unlike the biggest joke in th emedia today, Fox's slogan 'fair and balanced'.
The media often get it wrong, but the war cry for 'facts only' is miguided IMO.
Instead, we need to do the basic things like addrssing conflict of interest and allowing different voices and critical review of stories, to out the bias.
Something, funny enough, that blogs can do surprisingly well - and the lack of which provides plenty of material for Jon Stewart to use to point out the mistakes.
One more thing - when presented with factual stories, most readers are biased in their reading of them.
I've seen no shortage of perfectly factual stories get a response to the effect of 'that lying reporter hates American and should get the hell out'. Ya, that reeader needs just facts.
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