They used to try. Surely you can conceptualize a spectrum whereby on one the one side, people try very hard to be objective and be good at it, then where maybe they try a little less hard, or lack knowledge, or whatnot, and then continuing on the spectrum, where people throw up their hands and proclaim that no one can be objective, so who cares anyway.

I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magically discovered being unbiased is no longer a worthwhile goal, so throw up our hands and take a stand on every controversial topic, pick a side every time. No.

No, they didn't. That's my point. One of the most famous scenes in US TV News history was when Walter Kronkite, America's news daddy, finally had enough regarding the bullshit peddled by national television networks regarding the Vietnam war. It was NEVER unbiased. People love to believe that the news USED to be unbiased because the news produced at the time reconciles with their memory of the events they want to believe to be true. But we keep clippings of literally everything, and the one thing that is crystal clear is that what is being reported has always been focused through the lens of the mind of the person doing that reporting.

Go look at this link, which is a collection at Kent State University of articles written about the massacre at the school from the time of the shootings:

https://www.library.kent.edu/special-collections-and-archive...

Tell me how all of these articles are simultaneously unbiased from the headlines.

Biased and manipulated news is a spectrum like security. You can find instances of anything in the past of you look hard enough. We are currently in a time of more bias and manipulation than the 60s/70s.

Additionally, pointing out that Facebook lacks any fundamental principles and is just a reed in the wind is a great observation.

Not even close - look up COINTELPRO and how many of the letters that were sent by the discoverers of that information ACTUALLY made it, let alone how few that did make it actually got published. Hint : very few.

The media has always had to kowtow to some degree to local authority, and there is always the element of ‘the truth we choose to believe’ (or are being told to believe) being published over harder reality. The west tends to be more transparent than most, and more honest than most, but everyone is very far from, and has always been very far from, any sort of unbiased view.

COINTELPRO was a thing, yes, but now almost all news is manipulated. Then stuff related to those stories was, big difference.

>The media has always had to kowtow to some degree to local authority,

Yes, that's what I mean, to what degree? That degree is much greater now than it was in the past, except the one doing the manipulation isn't necessarily the government.

Do you have any first hand experience as a journalist in the 60’s to base that on?

Do you have any links to facts that might support those assertions?

If not, I rest my case?

The incentive to lie and manipulate is greater now than in the past. New information technology (nowadays social media....) increases the benefits of lying, and decreases the costs of doing so effectively. So I would expect there to be more today than 40 years ago.

> We are currently in a time of more bias and manipulation than the 60s/70s.

No, we are not.

News in that era was "unbiased" mostly because the US government had a soft censorship regime in the form of the FCC and corporate ownership of TV spectrum. Walter Kronkite calling out the government on Vietnam was the exception rather than the norm. What people are remembering isn't "objectivity", it's one particular bias[0] everyone was required to have in journalism - i.e. the illusion of objectivity.

Today's "biased" news is just regression to the American mean. When people got their news from newspapers, almost a century ago, you had similar levels of editorialization, bias, closed-mindedness, clickbait, misinformation, and so on. The "unbiased" era was largely a product of technical limitations that went away with cable, and later the Internet.

[0] Or, more specifically, what Noam Chomsky called the "five filters". See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

The news I consume presents multiple angles on stories. I heard an interview with a Douma member a couple of days ago who was claiming that Ukraine was bombing its own citizens

The journalist asked her what evidence they had, she said she had some, but when pushed she said "Russians just don't [bomb cities]", and couldn't produce any evidence. other than kept repeating that "Russian Troops do not bomb Ukrainian cities". It's an astounding claim given that we see Ukrainian cities being bombed and we see Russian troops in Ukraine.

There is objective truth, and there is objective lying. Maria Butina was the latter.

Individual journalists indeed tried (and still do), however editors and upper management have always tried to steer their staff in the direction which mostly benefits their shareholders or their biggest advertisers. If journalists still persist and write stories exposing the wrong people, those journalists do loose their jobs and their stories do get canned or watered down (e.g. with equal presentation of “the other side”).

Editors aren’t always evil and do this on purpose, however as humans we all have implicit biases. And our biases increase if we feel like we owe somebody a favor (this is why doctors are not allowed to accept gifts from pharmaceutical companies in many countries). If upper management tells a senior editor that company A is their biggest advertiser, and a journalist tells a story unfavorable to company A, then the senior editor might feel like company A doesn’t deserve this treatment and orders a counter story which exonerates the company to be presented on the same page.

Eh, journalists are human and many have very strong political and ideological views that are quite apparent in their writing. Editors try to tie together the paper into a coherent voice and brand, which also needs to be able to ‘feed itself’ somehow.

I wouldn’t put anyone on a high horse here.

Yeah, just look at the following:

1. I believe that I am a rational human being

2. My rational way of thinking has lead me to certain set of beliefs about the world and how it operates

3. I don't think about these beliefs all the time, because they make sense to me, but I reserve the right to change them should my perception change

4. It may take a while for my beliefs to change since these are conclusions I have made after thinking about topics rationally for a period of time. A sunk cost of sorts, if you will.

I think that most people would see that list and say hey, there's a person who is probably rational and introspective.

Now add the following:

0. I am a journalist

5. I report facts objectively but my decision making process on what is important to the reader may be affected by my human brain and my idea of the situation garnered from my experience with the subject matter and my human beliefs

This still isn't the dreaded "media bias," although it's clearly a bias. We have more accurate journalism right now than in any other part of human history. We just have more editorialising too.

What I'm specifically arguing against is that there was ever a time when there WASN'T bias in journalism. That's nonsense.

Journalism is a craft which takes a level of expertise to master. Many journalists have spent decades mastering this craft which sometimes includes a degree in higher education. Knowing and adjusting for your biases is very much a part of this craft and good journalists do get really good at that skill. In fact knowing and adjusting for your biases is such a big part of journalism that you can assume that a journalist that doesn’t possess this skill is gonna be pretty poor at their job.

Now this is not to say that good journalists employ this skill effortlessly and infallibly. No of course not, however a good journalist will do this better then a person who is not skilled in the craft of journalism. You might claim that I’m putting journalists on a high horse here, however I’m only doing so by recognizing that they practice a craft with increasing skill levels. If this puts journalists on a high horse, then same can be said about physicists or doctors, in that they get better at their craft with practice.

NYT has history of not being objective. 1930s New York Times purposefully lied about famine in Ukraine which purposefully starved millions. Walter Duranty got a Pulitzer Prize for that fake journalism. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/re...

> They used to try.

Simply not true. Read about the news industry from the founders to yellow journalism to the world wars to present day. There was never a time when news was objective. It wasn't created to be.

> I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magically discovered being unbiased is no longer a worthwhile goal

It was never an achievable goal. So what we should strive for is a diversity of opinions via a genuine set of diverse news organizations. Sadly, most of the media is owned by a few multinationals who themselves are owned by the same controlling interests.

> They used to try.

No, they didn't, much more than they do now.

But the ideological bias among the major media was more consistent, and when you get the same bias everywhere you look, it seems a lot like objectivity.

I don't know anyone who actually believes that. However, recognizing that objectivity in journalism is an ideal impossible to reach doesn't mean all variations are equal, or that attempting to hew closer to the idea is pointless.

I think there is a reasonable argument the the general state of journalism and and availability of news to the general public is worse now than it was, say, 30 years ago. Or that 200 years ago was worse than now. I'm not sure I'm convinced, but the arguments aren't prima facie wrong.

That view can only be supported by false nostalgia or a VERY selective reading of the material and history of the time IMO.

It was a mess, widespread censorship, corruption, and yellow news was common, and it was a period of extreme social turmoil.

We're talking early to mid 90's. I agree it was bad on all those aspects - but some at least are arguably notably worse now. How it nets out isn't obvious.

Oops, I thought I was in the comment thread I replied to that was explicitly calling out the 60’s.

The 90’s have tons of examples of manipulation (Gulf War 1?), as do the 80’s, 70’s, etc etc.

It’s hard to contextualize any of that without being embedded in it though. What age were you then?

If you are talking about mine, it never did. I haven't edited it, it refers to 30 years ago or 200. The one I was replying to didn't either, at least when I read it.

Perhaps you meant something upstream or a sibling comment?

Yes, they were never unbiased or objective, but they would often try to be a bit less biased and a bit objective. Now some journalists openly mock such efforts and see their job as creating a narrative that suits their political agenda.

This is shocking to me and others because the watered down objectivity of the past was still better than nothing.

I didn’t grow up in America so this might be different there, but I remember news from my early adult years and they were indeed badly biased. In the past 10 years, two things have changed however, the state media got more powerful and hired a bunch of qualified people, and—more importantly—independent media has proliferated. The media landscape of today is unrecognizable. Accountability hardly existed in the past, but now it does. You can see this by simply comparing the behavior of older politicians who were used to get away with everything and still continue their corrupt behavior, which today they are exposed doing all the time.

If anything—at least where I’m from—the news is still biases (always has been) but this bias which used to favor the rich and the powerful, has radically shifted to favor ordinary people. The news of the past that I remembered were actively—and probably knowingly—biased in favor of their stakeholders. Today they don’t, or at least not nearly to the same degree.

I think that part of the problem is that people confuse journalism, which is what reporters at newspapers and people in the field do, and editorialism, which is what normally happens on Fox and CNN.

Editorials are not journalism, but when the journalism disagrees with people who are accustomed to the nature of the editorials they enjoy, they then see bias on the part of the journalists instead of the commentators.

Even if an article is written that only contains hard facts there are many ways it can be biased. It could exclude inconvenient facts (this is the most common), it can have inconvenient information at the end of the article where most people don't read. Some news can also just be ignored. Some parts of a story are never surfaced simply because no one cares about it or knows about it.

Journalists are flawed humans like everyone else and expecting them to produce complete and objective reporting is not only unfair it is literally impossible.

So no, I do not believe there is such a thing as objective reporting generated by a single human or a single organization. The only true, unbiased journalism would be some sort of technology that could let everyone view the full entirety of any event from any perspective without a human brain and sensory system in between. That's not practical.

Practically speaking, it is up to the reader to consume as many varying sources as possible and then come to their own conclusion. But who has time for that?

Simply choosing what gets reporter time or page space or air time or whatever introduces huge bias, even if the coverage itself is meaningfully "objective". Listen to NPR (let alone anything else) and you'd think there's rarely labor action happening. Listen to Democracy Now and you'd think there's constantly labor action happening.

More importantly, because neither system gives you meaningful context, both of those things you mention can be true at the same time and you could never know which to trust.

When you want to validate a piece of information in your view of the world (to use your example, "how common is labor action?"), the most important question to ask (and often the question with the most obscure answer) is "what is the base rate?".

Wasnt there an old ~8 hour long movie about the media making up stories to sell news?

Edit: I cannot remember the name, I just remember being in JB HiFi in Australia looking at DVDs and there was an old black and white movie from the 20s or 30s about a guy who has a new empire but they make up stories to sell the paper and none of it was real. I just remember not buying it because the time was something like 6-8 hours long.

And dozens of essays by post-modern philosophers about (e.g. Public Opinion Does Not Exist by Bourdieu [1972]) and subsequent psychological studies about inherent biases, which together pretty resoundingly proves the non-existence of unbiased media. Furthermore it shows that biases correlate with benefactors, so you can expect more biases in platforms which rely on shareholders, named donations or advertisements.

I don't know about a movie, but there have been several books written about media bias by people in the media. One example is Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias." (https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp...)

It's an age old trope - just look at the Daily Bugle.

> Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding.

'Vaccines contain Mercury' and 'this meal contains Chlorine' is correct information - there is an atom of mercury in the molecule of RNA and an atom of chlorine in table salt.

I think you're agreeing with the quote?

But your examples are not correct information. "We're all made of star stuff" does not mean we're stars. A molecule of RNA is not mercury and table salt is not chlorine.

Civics and history education (at least in the US, I dunno about elsewhere) is astonishingly, dangerously bad. Is the reason these notions are so common, I think.

And even when they're regurgitating, they're regurgitating something written by a PR pro.