What is unbiased? If you were a late 18th century french reporter writing a report about the death of king Louis XVI, would you write "King Louis was murdered", "King Louis was executed", "former king Louis executed by means of guillotine for high treason", "citizen Louis Capet beheaded on the order of the National Convention" or something else? All of those descriptions can be considered true and yet none are unbiased.

Not only that, but either reporting it or not reporting it could also be considered bias.

Could a legitimate news organisation (considering it'd be the biggest news of the day) justify not covering it, or moving their coverage to Page 56?

That's one of the biggest criticisms I see of bias in the media, is the flexing of prominence based on stories of a similar (wider) importance.

What's the bias you see in the statements "King Louis was executed" or "former king Louis executed by means of guillotine for high treason"? Both the terms "execution" and "high treason" are objective descriptions takens from the proceedings.

No? Treason is in the eye of the revolutionary judge. The trial was never a fair one, the outcome was clear from the start. And from an unfair trial and an unjust judgement you can't lawfully execute someone, you can only murder him execution-style.

To me, "executed for high treason" has the meaning that the person or organisation that killed him considered him to be guilty of high treason, and that they considered themselves to have the authority to decide to execute them, not that the paper with that headline necessarily agrees with either of those things. Similarly, a modern newspaper saying that someone "was executed by a gang for theft of their drugs" doesn't necessarily mean that they actually did take the drugs, that taking the drugs did constitute theft, or that the killing wasn't murder. So I think does count as objectively true.

Depends on the newspaper. Things that the newspaper doesn't want to judge the truth of usually get put in quotes or have attributes like "alledged" or "supposed" added. Without such limiting additions, the newspaper is assumed to embrace the written statement as true and will e.g. be liable for slander. The yellow press will care more about the catchy headline than the slander charges, so they usually avoid being precise and accept the punishment as cost of running their rag...

You are conflating reporting and editorializing. Whether the trial was fair and the execution just is an opinion, and yes, that has a bias. But whether you agree with the sentence has no bearing on whether it took place.

So no, you can't have it both ways. You can't point to objective reporting and claim it has a bias, when in reality you mean that the reporting isn't showing your preferred bias.

There are freedom fighters and terrorists. There are fair trials and star chambers. There is information and propaganda. There are governments and regimes.

Both are true, and which term you use just depends on your point of view. Both are true, but not unbiased.

There is no proper objectivity outside of the sciences. Everything in culture, society and politics depends on an everchanging inconsistent and observer-dependent frame of reference. You can be kind-of objective if all of you and your local neighbourhood agree on a common frame of reference. But you always have to be aware of the lack of global objectivity.

How about this one:

Critics agree that Mr Obama's middle name is Hussein and he is likely an islamic terrorist.

The first part is obviously true. For the second part, I am fairly certain I can find two people on 4chan who agrees with this, and they will certainly be critics of Obama.

Statements of objective truths can still be biased.

Sure, but that assumes legitimacy of the proceedings, which "was murdered" does not.

The bias is in the use of the word "King".

Deposed King Luis Executed by Revolutionary Government.

It's not hard to be objective when you put your mind to it. It's just that it doesn't pay since everyone has a spin they prefer.

Would you say that "Illegitimate Tyrant Lincoln Executed by Sympathizer of Revolutionary Government" is a fair description?

Surely you understand the political connotations of the words deposed, king, executed, revolutionary, and government. Pretty much the only thing "objective" in your description is the guy's name.

"Unbiased" means "excluding analysis". It means only parroting the verifiable statements and not adding on anything else.

One compromise is to find a news source that is at least open about its bias. The Economist is a famous example of this: it will openly declare support (and opposition) for particular political candidates and policies.

The Economist at least seems to be good at giving its opponents space within its pages (for those of us who still subscribe to the print edition).

So while they have a bias they acknowledge, it isn't a "beat them into submission" type of bias.

"Transparency is the new objectivity."

> I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.

No one on this planet is 100% unbiased. It doesn't matter if it's free or $100 per article, it's still written by a human being with personal opinions, experiences, prejudices, &c.

The easiest way to get close to the "truth", which is subjective in many cases anyways, is to read from many sources and cross check the facts between them.

Even if that kind of neutrality is not achievable it has been practiced by journalists for the longest time and they tried their best.

Should we forego every trial because no judge can be impartial? The argument is lacking.

That impartiality doesn't lead to economic success and sustainability for outlets is another story of course.

Cross checking is required even if journalists wouldn't be as active in framing stories of course.

Neutrality in reporting is a relatively new concept and was brought about by the wire services so that they could have their content bought by the broadest reach of newspapers. You will still find unbiased reporting in the wire services themselves: Reuters, AP, etc.

Individual news sources have almost always been biased. This is why most cities had at least 2 major newspapers until relatively recently. You could get the liberal one or the conservative one (or in some places dozens of wildly politicized papers, anarchist papers from the early 1900s are great).

Consolidation has lead to a removal of voices from most local newspapers and the market has spoken when it comes to television: people prefer partisan news sources. The internet has gotten us closer to that 1900 view but then Facebook/Google became the arbiters of news for most people.

The real problem is that for-profit news reporting will always start copying the biases of its readers, because that's how you'll sell more papers to them.

Only state-funded news sources are imune to that, of course they have perverse incentives of their own.

Present day, for local news, you can still get quite close to this compared to your perceived past standard. You can get as close as you can to this ideal on world news as your perceived past standard if you limit yourself to Reuters, AFP, AP.

But many find these sources unengaging since they report events as they occur and do not contextualize them in media narratives to the extent that more commonly popular news outlets do.

Numbers are objective, and all too often I see them manipulated in rather creative ways to paint a picture. It is certainly possible to present the hard numbers of a scientific paper as an easily digestible article without picking out only the more convenient ones.

> No one is 100% unbiased

No, and every journalist should know that and keep their own bias in mind when writing. One can have an opinion and still present a plausible alternative.

Although that is true, it would be very easy to be much better at it than most major media sources. There are theoretical limits then there is the limit that those clods actually achieve. It is a rare, rare day when an article manages to quote an entire paragraph of what a politician said, context and all.

I think it is incredibly hard to not tilt one way. After all, organisations are run by humans and we all have our own leanings. It is very much possible when we hire people those leanings bias us towards a certain ideology and we may hire like minded individuals. Also, people who don't fit the ideological tilt might feel left out and may leave on their own. So, over time a media organisation will come to represent one side more.

This all in addition to the biases that can come from the owners/company bankrolling the media house.

Agreed. Even if you get past the first layer, which is to create something that sells. You’re still left with organisational biases. Then after that personal reporter biases.

It would take a large conscious effort to get past all of these.

"Objectivity" in journalism does not mean unbiased, or The Truth.

Simple recipe to follow:

- Show your work.

- Cite your sources.

- Corroborate.

- Sign your name.

- Admit your mistakes.

Voila, you're a journalist.

> Cite your sources.

We're on the Internet. Link your sources or provide them as raw footage. At least it'd eliminate some attempts to modify/exaggerate news like the CNN is doing all the time.

those mean the same thing...

> I want somebody to just report and not tilt it in one direction.

This is unfortunately not possible. Even if an outlet only providing objective, verifiable facts there is some angle or bias in what facts you chose to report and what issues you chose to investigate.

You want something you can trust absolutely and not have to engage with critically at all. It's a reasonable desire, but one much more likely to be fulfilled in the realm of religious faith than that of news or any other human activity.

One reasonable way to deal with that would be to subscribe to several sources which lean in different directions and then explore the situation from various angles.

Pay for quality, but understand the tilt. If you really want to, pay for two services with opposing tilts, but equal (high) quality.

In the UK I subscribe to "The Week", which covers stories by reporting what different newspapers report.

You don't get much in depth, but you do get a good cross-section of how stories are reported, and you get to remove headlines which is the source of 96% of the world's troubles.

Wow, that sounds wonderful. I hardly read Australian news, but I would subscribe to something like that for Australian News!

Austrailian version shut down in 2012, when it was attracting 28k issues a week.

UK version does fairly well, 3rd after Private Eye and Economist. They do a junior version for I guess 8-13 year olds too which is doing well too, so that's good.

Friend of mine runs a magazine aimed at people who like horses (typically well-to-do female over 35s) with c. 25,000 copies a week pre-covid. It was about 70:30 subscription. Subscription is up a little since covid, but newsstand sales are way down.

I use twitter for that. Don't follow journos/news orgs. Just follow topics and saved search terms.

On top of that, multiple sources from social media and news organisations paints the real picture of what's really going on and exposes a particular narrative and who is omitting information.

The real danger is getting your news from a single social media or news org source.

The FT should serve you well.

It is sad that the WSJ sold out to the Murdochs and lost their way. It used to be the case that financial papers would have an agenda on their opinion pages, but when it came to making money people needed/wanted the truth or something as close as possible to this -- the market did not care about spin and believing spin that differed from reality would cost you money.

I was a decades-long subscriber to the WSJ print edition and as long as I ignored the last few pages of the first section I was a happy camper. I cannot imagine what possessed Murdoch to engage in such value-destruction, but the FT and Economist are now my go-to sources for getting news that is as low-spin as possible.

This is what i have concluded too. I was in similar position where i found that what ever i read it always seemed biased. FT has been very good.

Indeed. The FT is probably the only pay-walled source I would be happy to pay for at this point.

This is called "false balance." Reality doesn't have sides.

The point is not to advocate for both sides, but just to tell the part of the story that both sides use to conjure their slants.

Reuters is pretty good (at least for US and world news; I don't know how they are for UK).

AP seems to me to be fairly reasonable (not dramatically slanted one way or the other).

This could be possible some 20 years ago, maybe. But these day even if you choose to just describe bare fact, you will still be criticized for the choice of words, such as "riot". Moreover, if you describe facts in full, including some background details, you will be crticized by people shouting "How is this relevant?!"

The FT is good, as is stratfor.com

You can aggregate across news sources, eg factr.com

I'm not a fan of the left-right dichotomy; it's a kind of shorthand derived from historical reasons, which encourages tribalism.

Even to take it at face value, 'left' and 'right' are only directions, not absolute positions. There is no objective centre.

That sounds like the 'Reality has a well known liberal bias' joke.

> Colbert then mocked Bush's sinking approval ratings:

> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias ... Sir, pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, [...] because 32 percent means it's two-thirds empty. There's still some liquid in that glass, is my point. But I wouldn't drink it. The last third is usually backwash.[18]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_Wh...