News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S. This Year. Parent comment

Re:Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S... by loudmax on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @02:50PM (#25434242)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S... by gameswithgo on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:25PM (#25434766)
> 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?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S... by smithza on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @03:48PM (#25435046)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S... by 80386 on Tuesday December 15, 2020 @09:55PM (#25438511)
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?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Record Breaking Number of Journalists Arrested in the U.S... by shadowprofile77 on Wednesday December 16, 2020 @02:26AM (#25439970)
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.

[ Parent | on HN ]