- Trump backs away from demand for border wall money
- The State Department is apparently spending money to officially promote Mar-a-Lago
- Trump’s border-wall fantasy is crumbling
- Trump’s White House Family Affair Looks A Lot Like The Most Corrupt Nations In The World
- CNN’s Tapper: US 'shamelessly' advertising Trump's businesses
- Poll: 73% Back Independent Probe of Russian Election Interference
- Anderson Cooper Warns: Don’t Be ‘Desensitized’ By Trump’s ‘Fake Facts’
- Mar-A-Lago removed from State Department blog after ethics outcry
Only one of those items was real news:
- Entire U.S. Senate to go to White House for North Korea briefing
Any real solution needs to make sure that it doesn't devolve to this mess.
On each point:
- Trump was demanding "border wall money" and it was threatening to derail the debate over a budget CR. If he had not caved, the US government would have shut down on Friday. How is that not real news?
- If the State Department is spending money to promote MAr-a-Lago, how is that not corruption? How is corruption not news?
- same as (1). Also, check the URL: wp.com/opinion
- Giving powerful jobs to family members is the definition of nepotism. This is certainly commentary
- same as (2)
- Politicians make decisions based on poll data. Should the public not be told of poll results?
- Yeah, it's an opinion. It's not pretending to be news.
- Same as 2
I don't actually get the complaint. Do you consider everything negative about the President "biased"? What if he dies? Would reporting that be considered "biased", because it could have an impact on his chances of reelection?
I expect, in other words, the Wall Street Journal curated headline list to look different from the New York Times headline list, and likewise for the New York Times headline list to look different from the Economist headline list, and that to look very different from my local city paper headline list.
To me, "unbiased news" therefore does not in practice exist (and most complaints about bias are merely complaining that something exhibits "the wrong" bias.) The only true way of coming close to "unbiased news" is probably via meta-analysis. Humans probably cannot handle this for all articles -- a single person would be overloaded with information.
Realistically, the best you can do is limit yourself to a few select news sources that you find the most trustworthy, or that you care about personally (eg more specialized news sources). There is bias even in that, but as long as your curation isn't in one silo, you are probably more informed than most.
(Maybe machine learning could be used to generate meta-analysis of news items with as little "bias" as possible, however even here there's a strong possibility that the bias of the "trainer" would end up dominating...)
"Bias", such as it is, is entirely in what stories are presented, and the slant given to them.
As another example consider this NYTimes article[0] "Free Market for Education? Economists Generally Don’t Buy It", which refers to a study where 36% Economists surveyed think vouchers would be good, 19% think they would be bad, and 45% are undecided. By lumping together "undecided" and "bad" the article can correctly make the claim "generally don't buy it", but another way of interpreting the data would be "about twice as many economists are pro-voucher as anti-voucher". But that's a headline you'd expect on Fox rather than NYTimes. But both are true!
[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/upshot/free-market-for...
If, for example, some segment of the population starts believing that a presidential candidate is running a child prostitution ring from a DC pizza joint, it isn't "bias" when the media does not afford it equal weight to, say, a joint FBI/NSA/CIA/DJ statement regarding a crime.