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A comment on Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Search for Solutions. Parent comment

Re:Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Sea... by roenxi on Thursday November 21, 2019 @02:20AM (#21592071)
There are a bunch of biases that are pretty safe to call good. For example, bias against intellectually dishonest ideas (best of social sciences). Or a bias towards peace and prosperity (pick your favourite, lots of people biased in this direction), or a bias towards mathematical correctness (eg, fivethirtyeight.com). Or a very clear mandate and a bias to fulfilling it honestly (eg, a homelessness focused charity that is relentlessly evidence driven).

There is a big gap between those sort of biases and Not-Trump-At-Any-Cost or Must-Sell-Public-Assets. Some biases are productive and have motivations which can be honestly articulated and are broadly reasonable.

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Re:Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Sea... by StuffedParrot on Thursday November 21, 2019 @09:52AM (#21594558)
Why is a center bias inherently better? You call it “pretty safe to call good”. That’s actually excellent framing: PBS (I should clarify, I refer specifically to the news hour) plays it safe and doesn’t report anything not on other comparable stations or news outlets, but they do it with an enormous amount of decorum.

That said, frontline occasionally covers things the news hour won’t and can be a serious investigative journalism outlet.

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Re:Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Sea... by roenxi on Thursday November 21, 2019 @03:33PM (#21599270)
If you read closely you'll observe that I'm not talking about the 'centre' (whatever that means, the word doesn't label a fixed set of things). I'm talking primarily about evidence based biases and secondarily biases towards being flexible and moderate.

It may be as many as 80% of the population would support evidence-based biases, in theory. There are still problems but it is a big step up from inflexible partisanship.

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Re:Losing the News: The Decimation of Local News and the Sea... by StuffedParrot on Friday November 22, 2019 @03:10AM (#21603766)
I believe I replied to the wrong comment; I agree with your assessment about biases. I meant it as a neutral term, I would ideally like the biases to align with my own.
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