[braveo]

I seriously dislike it when people use this sort of false dichotomy.

Look, you can be biased and have an opinion and still treat dissenting opinions, and the people who hold them, with fairness and understanding.

It doesn't happen, but it CAN. It's the 3rd option between "has no point of view" and "crafts a narrative around their point of view".

[dkarl]

I'm not sure how you expect people not to construct narratives around their point of view. If you read the Wall Street Journal and New York Times stories about the same event (or the Financial Times and Guardian stories about the same event) you'll see slightly different stories told with slightly different subsets of the available facts. That's what having a point of view is all about.

I'd rather get the Times point of view from the Times stories and the WSJ point of view from the WSJ stories than ask them to converge on exactly the same dry list of uninterpreted facts (if that were even possible.) They can try to do justice to other points of view, and it certainly helps their credibility when they're able to, but I wouldn't depend on it. Not even if they had the purest motivations. It's better to have a diversity of voices than to have one dominant voice doing a ventriloquist act.

Also, I think people ask for "fairness and understanding" but want a great deal more; they want to feel that their ideas are held in equal esteem, when in reality ideas can't all have an equal share of social approval. If I went to a singles bar with Ryan Gosling, I could justifiably ask to be treated with equal civility, but not with equal enthusiasm. No amount of civility or journalistic detachment can enable us to forget that different ideas prevail among different groups of people with different levels of wealth, power, social prestige, and cultural cachet.

[braveo]

> ... told with slightly different subsets of the available facts.

What makes me worry about humanity is the fact that you said that with a straight face as if we, as a society, can't (or shouldn't) demand that they tell the story with the same set of facts.

Treating the other side with fairness and understanding MEANS acknowledging all the facts.

> ... than ask them to converge on exactly the same dry list of uninterpreted facts

This is a false dichotomy.

> Also, I think people ask for "fairness and understanding" but want a great deal more;

And you just twisted my words, which doesn't need to happen in order for us to have a conversation. But you chose to do it anyway because you're not interested in a conversation, you're not interested in fairness, you're interested in pushing a narrative.

And it sucks that people like you exist.