> On one side, the death of traditional journalism really has opened up folks' eyes to bias in reporting. Having one or two main-stream news sources really opens up the possibility for bias becoming truth.

This is not what I see happening. Instead what happens is people see news they disagree with and deem it biased. So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news.

So here's the dilemma I'm faced with. As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible, while also being aware that at least some bias is inevitable (no matter how well-intentioned the author may be)... how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?

Others have given great responses, but one thing not emphasized enough is recognizing the type of language used. It failed for various reasons, but The Knife used to do a textual analysis of articles and point out the manipulative language used. A quick example off the top of my head is recent reporting on the US election (all paraphrased, but I bet you can find real examples easily):

"... baseless claims" "... without evidence" "... debunked conspiracy theory"

These may be factual in some (or all) cases, but it is manipulative language. It prejudices the reader without giving the reader a chance to even consider the claims or theory. There's much to be discussed about dis- and misinformation, but overall the truth emerges only in sunlight.

Also watch those adjectives. They love their superfluous adjectives.

This. This. This.

I'll throw in a few other ideas:

1. 'Opinion' panels should come from both sides of the political isle. Thoughtful panelists should be able to get to the bottom of ideas (instead of getting caught up in partisan minutiae). If they can't have a good discussion they shouldn't be on the panel.

2. Recommendation algorithms _must_ attempt to diversify a user's taste rather than silo them. This is an ethical issue and may hurt the bottom line.

3. Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions. It is patronizing to have it any other way.

4. Context is key - sound bytes and cheap twitter drama are destroying journalistic integrity. Journalism is archaeology of the now. It should be treated with the rigor of a science. Have some respect for yourselves and we will do the same!

> Journalists should fundamentally believe bare facts speak for themselves and trust their readership to make the right conclusions.

I don't even mind someone spelling out the conclusion for me, as long as the article contains links to original sources so that I can verify it. But even that is rare. Most links in an article point to other articles written by the same newspaper.

As an example, suppose a newspaper writes an article about something related to Wikipedia. I would expect to see the word "Wikipedia" hyperlinked in the article many times, but none of those links would actually lead to Wikipedia; they would lead to random other articles of the same newspaper that happen to mention Wikipedia. It would be probably impossible to get to Wikipedia from the news article by merely following hyperlinks.

The problem is, if they just repeat the claim verbatim, and it's about a complex topic (such as election interference or vote rigging), how is the reader supposed to actually make a decision on the topic, without doing weeks of investigation on their own? Shouldn't it be the media's job to analyze the claims and then inform the reader if they're valid or not?

Aren't you then arguing that is explicitly the media's job to manufacture consent among the public, according to the interests of their shareholders? If so, I would agree that that is frequently the role of a journalist.

No, that is not what I am arguing. I'm saying that part of reporting claims by public figures is also providing the context of the claims made, so that the reader can make decisions with more information than just the claim (since the claim itself usually does not have enough information to make a decision).

Also, just an FYI, your comment didn't feel like it was written in good faith when I first read it. I had to actively suppress my bad faith detector to write my reply. Just feedback for future comments.

Except those aren't example of manipulative language as they're factual descriptions of the claims. If I say the sky is made of honey without any evidence to back my claim and you report on my statement describing it as having no evidence, you've done nothing wrong. Your description of my statement is not using superfluous adjectives.

Anyone making a claim of fact needs to be prepared to back it up. Far too many people game the media by making absurd claims knowing their claims will simply be reported verbatim. Accurately reporting a claim is presented without evidence or is repeating a previously debunked statement is a necessary counter against people making absurd factual claims.

There's a clear dividing line between making statement claiming fact and a statement of opinion. If I tell you I think the sky is made of honey I may be factually incorrect but I'm not claiming to be making a factual statement.

Claims of fact deserve much more scrutiny than opinions. You're entitled to any opinion you want but you are not entitled to your own facts. When your claims of facts pose a material danger to persons or simply the rule of law, especially when they come from people with a wide audience or power, they deserve even more scrutiny than some Joe Shmoe.

The real world doesn’t work like that and facts and opinions are almost always a mixed bucket. What you consider evidence or fact is not what someone else does. Implicitly there is a possibility any claim is wrong with a normal title, but some titles and articles bias the user. If you titled an article “Giantrobot claims those aren’t examples of manipulative language” that’s fine but if the same article was titled “Without evidence, giantrobot claims those aren’t examples of manipulative language” then that is bias. Because your level of what constitutes fact, opinion, and evidence is different from everyone else’s. Another example: What is evidence someone was in a specific room at a specific time? Someone seeing someone come out of it? Seeing someone with an item that came from the room? Someone else saw someone come out? Or do you yourself need to physically see it? There are just so many levels. In your example of the sky made of honey, don’t you think without evidence isn’t needed at all to let someone understand the facts. Isn’t allowing the claim to speak for itself do the same job.

First, bias happens. A journalist should aim to be objective but they are not saints of objectivity. Second, it's not unreasonable to editorialize a little bit when discussing statements that appear to a reasonable person to be made in bad faith or are self serving. If I routinely made claims of fact about the honey-like nature of the heavens despite frequent demonstrations of my claims' absurdity and falseness, it would not at all be unreasonable or "biased" to point out a priori that I still had not produced any evidence of my claims. It's certainly not unreasonable if I run late night TV commercials asking for money from pensioners to launch a mission to collect sky honey.

As for evidence of an event occurring, you'll also notice journalists go out of their way to second source statements of facts. They want first-hand accounts from named sources in order to put an identity and reputation up for scrutiny. Ideally they also want a second named source but failing that they will often accept unnamed sources (to whom the journalist knows the identity but does not publicly reveal it). This is a common practice specifically because journalists are rarely in the room when and where events occur.

I just wanted to chime in and say how unbelievably refreshing it is to see someone acknowledge this out loud. It seems like people typically ingest "news media" without much critical thought and repeat news headlines with total ignorance of the subjective or manipulative slant that the news outlet applies to the material. I imagine a lot of the manipulative wording is not even intentional, either, but I'm not sure that makes this any better. :\

"Without evidence" is state of fact, that is not manipulative. Also, if something was debunked multiple times already and is in fact conspiracy theory, it is perfectly appropriate to call it "debunked conspiracy theory".

What calling these manipulative and refusing these as statements does is that it biases writing towards claims without evidence and towards conspiracy theories. Because you dont allow writer to call them what they are.

> It prejudices the reader without giving the reader a chance to even consider the claims or theory.

Note that many without evidence behind them and conspiracy theories have claims that in isolation sounds ok. It is only when you check evidence and find that there is none you know to reject that.

For clarification, how do you say Trump has claimed without evidence the election was rigged, without it being manipulative? This is precisely what Trump did and has done for the last three election. He has made claims without evidence, baseless and any “evidence” that backs it up is debunked.

This is actually exactly what I’m talking about, these news agencies are reporting accurately the events. And you don’t like it.

I don't know how to answer your dilemma that all of us face. But to add some nuance... it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods. An individual reporter may stretch the truth more than we're comfortable with, but as a whole, the big news outlets are more likely to make mistakes than commit outright lies that they know are false.

Most of the bias is in deciding what stories to cover and what stories to ignore. They can't simply cover everything that happens. An organization needs to decide what stories are worthy of publishing, and how to frame these stories ("All the news that's fit to print"). And then which politicians do they want to ask questions of, and what types of questions, and that's even before deciding what experts, or "experts" or pundits or downright paid shills to comment on these stories. This is where the bias is.

> it's pretty rare for a news organization of whatever political persuasion to report outright falsehoods

Have you been not consuming news for the last 5 years?

Can you point to cases where this is common in mainstream news outlets? We are talking about exceptions, not norms. The 1619 Project and its revisionist perspective may have had misleading conclusions (or premises) but it was not committing errors of outright falsehood. This just an example of bias vs factual misinformation.

What's the merit in distinguishing between bias and factual misinformation?

The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?

It would be morally questionable, but it should definitely be their right to do exactly such a thing if that's their particular bias. It would be factual too, though with an extremely biased construction, which should itself also be their right.

To give a much more politically correct example of the very same thing, the media harps enormously on most cases of whites committing violence against black individuals. To do so is generally basically factual but the degree to which it is done without giving context can create an enormous slant to a more contextually nuanced situation.

Do something similar to journalists:

1) Cross-check. If a news source says something, see what others are saying. Especially others with no vested interest in agreeing with source 1.

2) (This is key, and where I think people tend to fail hardest) Reputation. Real news sources make mistakes. Real news sources print retractions. Real news sources have a reputation to curate. Guy sitting in his van ranting into a camera and posting to YouTube has none of those things and is not a news source. Keep track of who sucks and who doesn't and start down-sampling bad-reputation sources.

3) Separate news from analysis and know which you're looking at. A lot of news out there is doing more interpretation of fact than relaying fact. Be aware of interpretation---you don't have to disregard it, but remember the effect it has on you the listener (setting expectations changes how we interpret input) and the effect it has on the reporter (bias leads people to discard facts that don't fit and over-highlight facts that do). I'm personally always leery of stories that tell you what you should think before telling you what happened.

4) Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down. People in the middle of a riot have no idea what's going on. No matter what they're capturing on cameras at the scene, it's one vantage point of one event. What actually happened takes time to piece together from multiple vantage points. Resist the urge to let the scoop be the story for you and if something is important, do the leg-work to follow up on it and see what people learned in 1 week and 1 month. Medical and science reporting, in particular, often falls down here because they'll report on the first article on a topic and you never hear about follow-up studies, attempts to reproduce, or sometimes retractions from the original researchers.

This is helpful, and something I agree with mostly. Of course the difficulty is what you nodded towards in point 4: "Do the one thing the modern world discourages you from doing and slow the hell down". We lead busy lives and need to digest news quickly. It helps when you have a few voices from different domains that you trust, where you can let your guard (relatively) down.

The other thing that is helpful is your reminder to cross reference sources with no vested interest. The conspiracy-mongering journalist has a vested interest in his/her narrative looking convincing and will have a link to his merch site at the bottom of the article/vodcast/podcast.

Well, there are some standard ways, just like when you do research:

1. Check out a bunch of their articles on various topics, the more controversial the better. That way you can kind of gauge which way they lean.

2. Find some other source, preferably several, check out their biases they same way.

3. Then compare some articles about the same thing, from all these sources.

Look for stuff like references, sources, lack of weasel words or outrage inducing phrasing, aggrandizing vocabulary, etc. The more boring an article sounds, the more likely it is that the reporting is solid.

Yes, it's a lot of work, but you don't have to do it for every article, you do it maybe once every few years, to re-evaluate the options.

> As someone who wishes to consume news that is as factual as reasonably possible,

There really isn't such a thing. What you report and how you report it is inherently editorial.

For example Fox News simply isn't reporting on the conservative protesters that are rioting in DC right now (stabbings, property destruction, etc), or choosing to report it as specific, isolated incidents stripped away from the larger context ("a man was stabbed today in DC"...). They aren't saying anything that's false, and yet their viewers largely have no idea what is going on in DC right now. And conversely they frame Seattle and Portland as war zones where you can't even drive down the street without getting a bullet, because they are reporting every single incident and every broken window there.

> how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness, short of physically observing an event for yourself?

Well, live streams are a way that you can observe an event and the context surrounding it yourself, and observe the larger discussions happening on that in realtime (people talking about the stream on twitter/etc). But of course that's another filter bubble.

Also, virtually all official news media today has pro-corporate bias. Like, even MSNBC is owned and run by GE.

I would say it's more important to understand the biases of a particular source in general, and try to evaluate which is more credible in a particular instance.

But right now you can generally exclude most conservative-run media from any sort of credibility. Fox was outright established to be a voice for the Republican party itself (and there is no equivalent for Democrats), in the wake of the Nixon impeachment, because Murdoch felt that if the Republican party had been able to get its message directly to voters then Nixon would have been able to ride out impeachment (and he was right, this time it worked). From there the conservative media has gone off the deep end (OANN, Washington Times, etc) especially over the last 4 years. Criteria number one for credibility is "not conservative media", they simply have no interest in informing, only in defense and offense.

Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy".

Looking at The NYT's and the guardian's content on Portland/Seattle riots shows you the exact same phenomenon there.

I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility (CNN, Fox, et al.). Then I see even the closer to center but still unfortunately drifting away (NYT, economist, WSJ) as "take whatever they cover that's even the slightest culture war adjacent with a fistful of salt.

> I exclude all left aligned and right aligned media from credibility

Political alignment is a valid criterion to curate your news feed. However, if you apply that as your only criterion, you end up back at square on: getting a colored sliver of the news.

There are many more criteria you could apply as well. Is it a non-profit or a for profit outlet? Is the outlet based in the U.S. or is it located abroad, say, the E.U. or Asia? Is it a local, regional or national outlet? Is it an outlet I consider as my primary, daily go-to, or is it an outlet I consider as a weekend read? Is it an outlet focussing on a particular demographic? Which one? Am I part of that demographic? Does the outlet only provide short-form news articles, and/or long-reads with background information? Does the outlet report from a single side, or does it pit different perspectives against each other in equal measure?

Asking those questions to yourself adds differentiation in your how you curate your news intake.

The latter doesn't even have to be limited to other news outlets. Reading books is one of the best ways to gain the perspective one needs to digest the daily news.

I follow U.S. news sources but that doesn't mean I'm willing to accept what they publish at face value. Amending the news with many other sources helps me to gain perspective.

The trouble today is how much attention is diverted towards consuming fast digital media and being active in a 24/7 economy. If you don't take the time to stop, slow down and think about what the news is reporting, you're not going to develop the skills and the knowledge to properly digest the news and form nuanced opinions.

> Man, this reads to me like "My side's media is an angel and the other side is untrustworthy".

NY Times isn’t “my side's media”. It’s just another corporate media outlet.

The actual counterbalance to something like Fox News would be something like Democracy Now. Those outlets don’t really get any air time in popular culture as it exists today. And even then they spend a lot of time on pro-democracy and pro-freedom issues that don’t get airtime in other outlets, it’s not just “all left all the time”. Maybe give it a listen sometime and see what a true counterpart on the other side would sound like - it’s always enlightening to hear what other people hear. And bear in mind - that's what it sounds like for me to listen to Fox, too.

That’s a big part of the problem with the right-wing media bubble at the moment, you think the counterpart to Fox News is NYT but that’s a false equivalency. NYT is ultimately a middle of the road outlet, you’re just so far out of the mainstream that it looks left. I frequently consider NYT articles to be taking too much of a pro-right or pro-corporate stance on an issue (especially Maggie Haberman, she’s just awful).

At the end of the day the US has two right wing parties - one center-right and one far-right, and that's how our news media is structured too. We have two pro-corporate parties, and that's how our news media is structured too. MSNBC is owned by General Electric, with major interests in defense contracting. Washington Post is owned by Bezos. Fox is essentially a media arm of the Republican party. CNN are just sort of chaos monkeys chasing share prices. There is very little "independent media" in the US.

And no, I don’t take Democracy Now too seriously either.

If all you see is the right wing in the US, I don't think it's me who needs recalibration.

You think it's shocking that the country where the #1 cause of bankruptcy is an (often trivial) interaction with the free-market medical system, with the world's highest per-capita prison population, is right wing?

Ok then.

If you don't think the US is a right-wing country, you do need recalibration lol. And that's really both parties for the most part - the voice for, say, medicare for all, or for abolishing penal slavery, are basically nonexistent and non-mainstream.

In international terms, the US effectively has a far-right party and a centrist party, with a handful of leftists lumped into the centrist party where they're effectively sidelined in terms of policy.

The same country with ridiculous public spending on medical care under the disguise of a free market medical system? Literally 1.2 trillion dollars of federal spending on healthcare in 2019.

The same system that centrally plans and limits care provider production. You don't have market health care or socialised heath care. You have a solution that somehow combines the worst of both.

Then you look at the global dosage of other countries. Its the US socially right of China? Japan? Any part of Asia? If your calibration is literally the left half of the spectrum I guess you'd see the US as the farthest right of the world.

I like AP and Reuters for my news internationally, almost everyone sources them. For more local, I try to find news aggregators, an example for Canada is nationalnewswatch.ca , takes articles from across the spectrum. This is really just for events though, when it comes to issues in tech, climate, etc that aren't necessarily an event, I tend to look to individuals in the field who don't go into politics for their analysis

> how does one evaluate a news source for its trustworthiness

You evaluate multiple sources to independently verify information, and you hold each source up to consistently good ethical behavior and accurate information.

Basically, treat journalism like science, but a little more fast and loose (literally) because you can't wait for 10 years of research to determine how to act politically or economically.

The question I get me from your dilemma: it is worth the time evaluating a source for trustworthiness ?

I see it as a proxy for actual cross checking every time, but more and more, cross-checking is needed anyway. Some sources could be permanently rejected, but ‘trustworthy’ sources consistently miss important information that only come in corrections with a significant delay. If we’re not taking the info at face value, the “trust” part is not there anyway.

And if we’re talking about well thought and researched pieces, I’d argue we should also take the time to think about them and do our own sanity checks.

I found this book a good education in critical thinking skills when consuming news sources:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-World-Add-Up/dp/1408712245

Video link and summary of some of the books points can be found at:

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/risj-review/keep-...

I think this philosophical discussion is important, but just want to take a moment to point out that it often buries a pretty obvious lede and gives an out for aggressive bias.

For example, last night every major news site had a headline about Biden's electoral college victory, or about Biden's speech, or about the virus. Fox News's huge banner headline was that Joe Biden had "a bit of a cold". This to me indicates an extreme bias.

This is not to say other MSM sources aren't rife with bias--for example, all are staunchly pro-corporate, as they are owned by corporations. But bias does come in degrees; we must continually try to be aware of biases in our media, but we shouldn't treat all MSM as "equally biased and equally bad".

What I see happening is people experiencing news being delivered in a way that uses obviously biased language and phrasing and, not impressed with being taken for an idiot, they go elsewhere. There they will probably find the same sort of bias and then conclude that MSM is generally useless.

All you had to do was read their entire post

I don't think it's that. People have always seen things they disagreed with in the news. The bias now is undeniably real. For example, the NYT has lost its credibility with me by firing its editor for running an opinion that I disagree with.

> So they find a news outlet that they agree with and decide that’s the real news.

Watching the phrase "fake news" become coopted to mean "news unfavorable about Trump" instead of literally "false information" was one of the more depressing aspects of the 2016 election.

I don't think this "balance" framing really works.

Absolutely, traditional journalism had some problems with bias, and they were tough to improve.

I can't think of a single thing in journalism (NB, journalism, not information access) that hasn't become notably worse due to the collapse.

Sometimes it helps knowing a source is biased. Reading National Review, for example, allows you to assume the opinions held are relatively conservative. Reading the Bulwark, you know there is a progressive bent. Proceed with your own thoughtfulness therefore in comparing the two. We as consumers/readers never read an article without bias either.

Sure, but that hasn't changed in recent years.

What seems to have changed, to me at least, is that journalists have shed whatever veil of balance and impartiality they used to wear and have gone full fledged activist, even on the job. As such, their image is no longer of the semi-neutral third party, but just the foot soldier of the enemy's side of the culture war. Once you're there, there's no room for balance, or "tempering bias"; concession to the "enemy" is now disloyalty to your side.