[freehunter]

My small city is going through a minor scandal right now with the city council accused of giving preferential treatment to a developer while the neighbors around the proposed development are strongly against the work being done. Pretty common small city stuff, NIMBY, yadda yadda. We do have a local newspaper, and at every city council meeting the pro and con factions go to war either for or against the paper. The paper prints basic facts, which either side interprets as they will, and one side claiming the paper is biased towards the other side. Now half the city doesn't trust our newspaper.

Even one common source of facts can be skewed by personal opinion. The only thing the newspaper changes about the discussion is whose side of the argument the editor is on.

[MichaelGG]

Just printing facts isn't unbiased -- starting with the selection of which facts to print. Facts alone also lack context. You might factually state "radiation from Fukushima has been detected in the US". That sounds quite alarming! So you need to add some context like "This is because detection tech is very advanced. The levels are very low and pose no cause for concern." But then someone will criticise you for downplaying things.

So the newspaper could very well be biased and skewed, just in how they present or don't present certain facts, which context they provide, etc.

[charles-salvia]

I agree. A lot of the complaints about "fake news" and everything aren't so much directed at actual false information being reported - but rather the selection or emphasis of certain facts over others.

An obvious example was Fox News vs. CNN during the weeks leading up to the election. Neither company outright lied about anything (for the most part), but both published headlines emphasizing an entirely different set of facts. Fox News was constantly blasting headlines about the FBI investigating Hillary's email, while CNN was constantly blasting headlines about Trump's sexual misconduct allegations, etc. Neither were really lying in any sense - but they both painted completely different pictures designed to elicit differing opinions/reactions from their readers.

Of course, if you want real fake news - that exists as well and always has before it became a buzz word. The National Enquirer has been publishing fake news for decades, and nobody cares.

[TeMPOraL]

I think both parent and your Fukushima example argue for something else - that no matter how unbiased you are, someone will always inject their own bias into what you're saying, and then condemn you for it.

[freehunter]

Exactly. What I was getting at is that newspapers by themselves do not solve the issue of news dividing public opinion, they just provide one more point of reference. There's nothing inherently righteous about newspapers.

[r00fus]

In short: Bias is unavoidable. Selection of facts is itself a bias.

[rokhayakebe]

But Facts and Context should be separated very clearly, with big bold titles just as Articles and Comments are very clearly separated.

[ohjeez]

Twenty years ago, I wrote a story that explained something then-current in the news, and I included the viewpoints of both IBM and Microsoft.

I went into two CompuServe forums, both of which had people worked up over the story. In one forum, I was accused of being biased towards IBM. In another unrelated forum, someone said I must have been bought-off by Microsoft. The same day, the same story, the same reported facts.

That was the day that I knew I'd become a success as a journalist.

[mcbruiser3]

it's called inclusion / exclusion bias. as long as humans are involved there will always be bias.