News should strive for objectivity. But all news organizations need to make decisions. What do they include or omit from a story? What do they think is necessary to explain versus what the audience will already know? How do you present complex issues without veering into technical jargon most readers can't understand? Which photo and headline do they choose to go with the story?

These are subjective decisions all journalists and editors need to make.

“Bias” as a generalized complaint is effectively a straw man to beat up when debating the actual facts would be untenable, or make you looks like an asshole. If you think that isn’t obvious, think again.

Which is why it's usually the high-handed rationalist, the claimant of no bias, who is trying to sell you a pig in a poke. They either don't know it's just /r/iamverysmart stuff or don't care, but they're selling you something. Not the reporter with a story on their hands who admits to having an opinion.

Now we are hearing excuses (including in this thread) which are nothing more than cheap cop-outs, they are rationalizing their own acquiescence or surrender to intellectual laziness, logical fallacy, ignorance, and social irresponsibility. The fact is this lowering of standards is very useful for some people, and provides wiggle room to dishonest liars and frauds who would otherwise not be trusted, should be obvious.

Yes, one's senses are limited, one's knowledge is limited, and while investigating a story you are likely going to hear different versions from every witness to whom you speak. But what do you say to those who refuse to listen to contradicting yet valid information and/or viewpoints?

There is a large gap between those who are engaged in the pursuit of objective truth who nonetheless fail, and those who have their excuses loaded up while they tirelessly work to build consensus around what has become a narrative for a completely false reality. We are starting to see a bias against objective truth, a prevalence of defense mechanisms against logic and reason, and more and more demands for "allegiance" or "belief" in a given agenda-based narrative.

With more differing points of view intermingling than ever before, giving in to bias has never been more dangerous.

tldr: Just because its hard doesn't mean its not an important pursuit, much less take it as an excuse to accept the defeat of lowered standards or actual fraud for our perception of reality.

This seems like a false dichotomy to me. Surely there will always be some bias, and it will affect all the editorial decisions made by an organization and change the way topics are reported by journalists. However, just because bias can't be entirely eliminated, doesn't mean that there aren't objective standards of what constitutes minimally fair reporting. There are such standards; clearly discussing and defending these standards is an important goal.

It's for this reason that we can say that Reuters is a better, more objective source of news than the Huffington Post. And the latter is a better, more objective source of news than Breitbart. We can take such a position, and encourage others to seek out sources like Reuters, without taking the extreme position that Reuters is this fully unbiased magical source of objective news. Of course it isn't, but it doesn't have to be.

Bovine excrement and worse words. It is not an opinion that has been normalized. It is an acknowledgement of reality, of the lack of objective observers in any field not directly measurable with a pair of calipers--and it is a reality that people of certain epistemic closures wish to attack because that reality threatens those epistemic closures and the goals they wish to achieve with them.

Usually venal goals. But I digress.

So yeah, it's worse than not nonsense, at least for your argument: it's history. It's reality. News is not and has not ever been objective at any point you will name. Setting aside any reporting at all? At the absolute minimum, the most trusted names in news at any point in mass media have been selective in what they reported through that mass media apparatus and that is itself bias. Meanwhile? You have people the "unbiased news!" folks want to point at, like Walter Cronkite, who directly formed Americans' opinion on the Vietnam War by declaring it a "stalemate". No "unbiased news" would say that; they'd just say "well, this is happening". But to not characterize the state of the conflict would itself mislead those consuming that news. "Unbiased news" is the box score and nothing more and it's a superficial and broken way of viewing the world.

Meat robots get by on the box score. Thinking creatures require context and no context will ever, ever be unbiased. Analysis--filtering, concluding, fact-checking--is part of news. And it cannot be separated from an attention economy either personal or societal.

I'm sorry that that upsets you so, but only a little.