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An aside about "opinionated", because something I did a while ago gave me a different perspective. As a foreigner (who once lived in the US for almost a decade) I try to keep up with US news. Quite a while ago I actually added foxnews.com to my reading list - because I heard so many bad things about it (I had never even gone there before, but my list of regularly read websites is very small anyway), and I wanted to know just how bad "bad" was. I must say it turned out, in my opinion at least, that the articles are not actually all that bad. (I ignore anything anything from Hannity though - and oh boy, don't ever go to the forums.) Anyway, I find foxnews.com is a great example of finding bias not so much in the articles - but in the topics they select! Which of course is something everybody does. Every newspaper, website, or even private blog has a bias expressed merely in the selection of topics they cover, no matter how "neutral" the articles themselves are. If you just look at the headlines foxnews.com really stands out, but so does washingtonpost.com, which I find almost equally far from the middle of the topic distribution (they are trying way too hard to report every fart of that guy in the White House). My point is, this made it clear to me that no matter how hard you try, you can't help being opinionated because what you choose to concentrate on already is a huge factor, and that I only noticed that my own views are likely based on a similar selection bias when I looked at a very different selection from the one I had gotten used to. |