[AmericanChopper]

Most reporting is based on opinions, or is at least misleading in the sense that it tends to be reported from well defined perspective. The editorial decisions about what to report, what to not report, what to report as important or credible, and what to report as irrelevant or non-credible, can all be used to mislead the audience and misrepresent events. I can’t think of one mainstream news outlet that doesn’t do this, and I think all of them do it quite excessively.

The problem with trying to moderate this is that you can only do so from what your idea of which is the orthodox truth, and “propaganda” simply becomes any political speech that you disagree with.

We’ve seen plenty of attempts to regulate the truth throughout history. It was one of the most corrupt elements of the soviet system, and it quite literally Orwellian. The only person who can discern the truth is the individual, and any attempt to take that responsibility away from them can only ever end disastrously. This isn’t something we should be happy with Facebook doing.

[pjc50]

> The only person who can discern the truth is the individual

We're all postmodernists now.

[AmericanChopper]

That’s mostly a reductio ad absurdism, but even Plato didn’t believe that people had the potential to be ethical objectivists, and he certainly wasn’t a postmodernist.

Acting as an authority on which instances of political speech are true and which are false may be easier in some cases than others, but there’s no clear place to draw that line, and there’s no way to avoid imposing your own opinions on others.

[Retric]

You don’t need perfection. As long as you look for obvious objectively false statements you will reject quite a bit of propaganda / disinformation etc.

[travisoneill1]

You pretty much do in this case, since propaganda writers will adapt around your filter. Furthermore you have the problem of determining objective fact to filter on, which is a massive problem itself, as can be seen from the need for a filter in the first place.

[sharemywin]

Good news is based on fact and biased by a narrative. People need stories to understand. Facts are hard to process and remember for most. But, fact checking whether opinion or satire* or news can be useful for the average person that doesn't have the time to fact check.

*satire passing as news with fine print is garbage meant to mislead.

[beerandt]

The editorial selection of what to run, how long to cover it, and what the headline reads influences far more than anything else.

Which is why drudgereport is often the top of the list of sites D's want to regulate, even though Drudge rarely prints any original content.

And he links to way more left-leaning stories than you would expect, but grabs a buried right-leaning fact to re-title the link. Suddenly you're reading the story with the opposite expectation of what the reporter/editor often intended.

Equally effective is grabbing an over the top, inflammatory left-leaning fact (or quote or claim) to prime the reader with anger.

Both are extremely persuasive, without needing to change so much as a word of the linked text.

Edit: And of course the feed on fbook accomplishes much of the same for the opposing view, with slightly tweaked tactics, but the same overall strategy.

[Angostura]

So how do you feel about Ofcom's rules in the UK that regulate fairness and bias in broadcast channels? They seem to work fairly well.

[AmericanChopper]

I think the UK has an extraordinarily bad track record of allowing freedom of expression. Regarding ofcom though, they actually perform very little regulation of accuracy and impartiality, most of their work is as an ordinary utilities regulator, much like the FCC. To describe their regulatory action of section 5 of their broadcasting code (the part related to accuracy and fairness) as “working fairly well” is generous. I’d say a better description would be “not really functional”.

[Angostura]

It it weren't functional, of course, the UK TV landscape would look like the US landscape. And it doesn't. At all.

[pjc50]

It's completely failed to cope with the present crisis. And it doesn't stop the BBC having Andrew Neil, formerly of the Murdoch Times, Daily Mail and Tory house magazine Spectator as a leading political interviewer.

Worse, I don't think "fairness" is the correct standard - that leads to bringing in AGW deniers and anti-vaxers as "balance". The standard has to be Reithian: has this discussion contributed to the viewer's understanding of the situation? Repeating two opposing sets of talking points doesn't achieve that.

[repolfx]

The rules you mention are completely non-functional.

What would it mean to prevent bias in TV broadcast? Bias can show up in all sorts of subtle ways. You can't really demand people don't have opinions. You also can't ask people to be totally free of bias given limited broadcast minutes, and so many news stories to cover.

Given this starting point, you might begin by expecting people who make TV news to not publicly tell everyone about their own extreme political opinions. You might expect TV journalists not to belittle and insult major political parties.

You might expect these things, but you'd be disappointed because the Ofcom fails to enforce even this most basic of standards.

https://www.nme.com/news/channel-4-jon-snow-respond-claims-c...

What was also reported was that during one Glastonbury’s many, many chants, Jon Snow joined in to bellow “Fuck the Tories” before noting that he was “supposed to be neutral”.

You might expect supposedly neutral journalists not to openly compare political decisions to drug epidemics:

https://order-order.com/2019/09/24/bbc-compare-brexit-drugs-...

Presenter: "At times there can be a perception that most of the headlines surrounding Stoke-on-Trent have a negative connotation, whether it be Brexit or the drug monkey dust"

You might expect broadcasters not to hire political candidates to referee complaints about political bias:

https://order-order.com/2010/04/19/labour-candidate-is-bbc-b...

Ever wondered why your complaint of left-wing bias against the BBC wasn’t upheld? It could be because you were speaking to one Chris Summers on the phone. Via his Facebook we learn that Mr Summer’s isn’t too keen on his “dull, boring, grey, miserable, crap job – dealing with election complaints!” Would this be the same Chris Summers who is the Labour coucil candidate in Ealing?

You might expect that government enforcement would reduce allegations of bias to the status of supposition - they may not appear biased in public, but who knows how they are in private? But the UK doesn't even begin to approach this standard of enforced neutrality. All you have to do to prove it is read the Twitter feeds of the journalists themselves.

[bogomipz]

No, "most reporting" is certainly not "based on opinions." The only acceptable "opinions" expressed in straight reporting are the opinions of the people in the story i.e the subjects. To do otherwise is known as "editorializing" and has no place in a straight news story.

Newspapers have their own section for expressing the opinions of a writer and they are clearly labeled Editorial or OpEd.

It's bizarre to me that you want to be critical yet seem to lack a fundamental understanding of the thing you are being critical of.

[catacombs]

> Most reporting is based on opinions, or is at least misleading in the sense that it tends to be reported from well defined perspective.

What do you mean by this? Most new organizations have a separate, opinion section.

Does your statement include the news department, too?

[bko]

Not OP, but I think I think I see what he means. I get headlines from NYT and WSJ on my phone and sometimes you see the same news story with a different headline.

For instance recently I saw these headlines (paraphrasing):

(WSJ) Unemployment Drops to Lowest Level in 60 Years

(NYT) Unemployment Drops, Continuing the Trend of the Last 8 Years

Are these headlines necessarily editorialized? No, but I do notice this trend somewhat regularly in major publications

[paulddraper]

Even beyond editorializing as the sibling comments point out, there is considerable opinion in what is reported vs brushed aside.

On August 3, 46 people were shot in El Paso, Texas. [1]

That same weekend, 51 people were shot in Chicago, Illinois. [2] [3]

One statistic gets hours and hours of national press cycles, Wikipedia page, etc.

The other statistic gets a passing mention in local channel and papers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_El_Paso_shooting

[2] https://abc7chicago.com/49-shot-6-fatally-in-chicago-weekend...

[3] Later updated to 68, if you read Breibart https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2019/08/05/many-el-pasos-day...

[catacombs]

> On August 3, 46 people were shot in El Paso, Texas. > That same weekend, 51 people were shot in Chicago, Illinois.

One is not like the other.

The El Paso shooting was the result of one person, armed with semi-assault weapon, going into a Walmart and killing more than 20 people within a couple minutes.

The Chicago shootings resulted in seven deaths but were spread out among multiple cases and days.

Both are tragic obviously.

But the El Paso got wall-to-wall coverage because, in essence, it was a domestic terrorist attack.

[paulddraper]

> semi-assault

?

> The Chicago shootings resulted in seven deaths but were spread out among multiple cases and days.

Naturally, smaller events have less coverage. But even totaling up the coverages for each Chicago event in less coverage than El Paso.

Most new outlets bias their reporting disproportionately. IDK what the relationship is. Cubic, probably. An event that is 2 as big gets 8 times the coverage. Three times as big gets 27 times the coverage.

---

In any case, media frequently shows an unrepresentative perspective on reality. It is very easy -- indeed expected -- to change report reality based on the opinion of what should and should not be reported.

[catacombs]

> ?

The El Paso shooter used a semi-automatic rifle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASR-series_rifles

> Naturally, smaller events have less coverage. But even totaling up the coverages for each Chicago event in less coverage than El Paso.

Huh? The El Paso shooting was a big deal. Hence, the wall-to-wall coverage.

> Most new outlets bias their reporting disproportionately. IDK what the relationship is. Cubic, probably. An event that is 2 as big gets 8 times the coverage. Three times as big gets 27 times the coverage.

You don't seem to understand how reporting works. Journalists reporting on breaking news situations do not inject their opinions into the situation. They report what happened in a digestible and comprehensive way. Go and read the first coverage of the El Paso shooting and let me know if you see any opinions injected into the pieces.

> In any case, media frequently shows an unrepresentative perspective on reality. It is very easy -- indeed expected -- to change report reality based on the opinion of what should and should not be reported.

Again. You don't seem to understand how reporting works. I'd love for you to message the Texas reporters who covered the El Paso shooting your statement above and see how they'd response to your accusation that they, as well as other people who on the ground when shit hits the fans, shape their coverage based on opinion.

[damq]

One example is that news organizations will often choose not to report on crimes when they're committed by racial group A even when they report on the same crimes when committed by racial group B.

Highlighting or minimizing demographic information of victims and assailants in crimes is a huge way news organizations insert their biases while still reporting factually accurate information.

[losvedir]

> What do you mean by this?

Presumably the sentence that followed your quoted one:

> The editorial decisions about what to report, what to not report, what to report as important or credible, and what to report as irrelevant or non-credible, can all be used to mislead the audience and misrepresent events.

An amusing example of that phenomenon is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0], where a particularly shocking attack followed by a slow news season led to disproportionate reporting on shark attacks. There wasn't actually any more shark attacks than any other year, but try surveying people around then and they might think otherwise, even if all the reporting was only non-opinion, true statements.

It's related to the Chinese Robber fallacy. Here's a great blog post[1] which demonstrates the fallacy using news stories about cardiologists.

These are fun examples, but I'm sure you can think of it with a partisan bent about your favorite topic and news source.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chin...

[pfisch]

There is a pretty big difference between a lie by omission and just spreading false information.

By your definition any news would always be false because they didn't include the entire history of the world in their story.

You aren't being realistic. There are people and organizations that are just spreading completely false information with the intent of deceiving people.

[username90]

Lets say a publication only reports violent crime and rape committed by black people with vivid descriptions of the acts. All reports are 100% factual. Would you say that it is legitimate news?

[makomk]

A lie by omission can be used to convince the public of things that aren't true just the same as more direct methods of spreading false information.

[sharemywin]

I think the point is let's just focus on the blatant lies for right now. A. because it's easier and B doing nothing isn't working.

[AmericanChopper]

By my definition it is generally not possible for an entity to be an effective authority on what is or is not false or misleading. You could think of contrived examples which you could get nearly everybody to agree to as false, like claiming the sun revolved around the earth. But that’s not what’s being discussed. What’s being discussed is establishing Facebook (or other entities) as the ministry of truth.

> There is a pretty big difference between a lie by omission and just spreading false information.

I don’t see how there is, and I don’t see how you’d be able to prove one over the other in many cases. Pick any mainstream media outlet, and you’ll find a significant group of people who claim they’re “just spreading false information”. Pick any truth that you personally hold to be unassailable, and chances are you’ll find a significant group of people who will describe it as “just false information”.

Trying to regulate the truth is an incredibly dangerous rabbit hole, which if done effectively, can only possibly end up with a central authority (or group of authorities) imposing their own views on others.

The only reason anybody could think this was a good idea, is if you think that people should not have the right to think for themselves, form their own views, and come to their own conclusions about the truth.

[apatters]

What do you think of the Media Bias Chart? https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

This project assesses the factual accuracy and political bias of a large number of articles (and by extension, the publishers of those articles).

It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual, and that's a big part of what good journalism is.

A verifiable fact is a verifiable fact and no matter how many people believe otherwise, it's still a fact.

Certainly this is not the whole issue and publications may introduce bias through selection, presentation and opinion, which is why it's important to scrutinize the publications.

I don't think Facebook is the right place for any of this to happen, but it's where the eyeballs are, so it's impossible for it to _not_ happen on Facebook in some form. I think Facebook will fail because there is no way to do this algorithmically. At Facebook scale you can only do things algorithmically.

We should dismantle Facebook and get our news from a federated set of relays which syndicate content from a diverse set of publishers whose objectivity is audited by independent third parties who publish clear and transparent guidelines and findings.

A web browser in which you've bookmarked the Associated Press, NPR, the WSJ, and the BBC is a decent start for the average person, as long as you don't also bookmark Wonkette or InfoWars.

[AmericanChopper]

So you don’t believe that you can use facts to mislead people, nor that you can mislead people without presenting anything as fact?

If you report a story, using only the facts that support your narrative, and omitting only the facts that don’t support it, have you lied? Have you reported propaganda?

What if you report a story, without reporting anything as a fact? What if you report “anonymous sources claim ___”, or “___ is being criticised for ___”, or “a verified document describes ___”. None of those reports involve any facts at all, nor any verifiable fictions.

What if you simply disagree on what the facts are?

What if you intentionally misinterpret something, in an effort to debunk it. If I make a mostly true statement, but use an obvious hyperbole, or get a minor detail wrong, am I “just using the English language as intended”, or “just spreading false information”.

> What do you think of the Media Bias Chart?

I think if you tasked 50 different research teams with producing their own chart with the methods they deemed best, that you’d get 50 different charts.

> It seems to me that we have always had the ability to verify whether a given statement is factual or counterfactual

We have always had the ability to enforce authority on others. That doesn’t mean we have had any success in creating authorities to be the arbiter of truth. In fact, we have a long history as a species of failing miserably at doing that.

Easily verifiable outright lies in the media do happen, but the cases where this is so black and white are incredibly uncommon, and that’s not what these systems are trying to deal with. I mean, recently “conspiracy theories” have become a target for moderation. Do you know what a conspiracy theory actually is? It’s any theory that two or more people conspired to do something. How much recent news reporting would fit that definition?

Any system that attempts to strip people of their right to critical though (which is what this is) is doomed to fail in the exact same way that every such system implemented throughout history has.

[apatters]

I counted at least six questions in your response -- I appreciate the response, but do you really expect a rational person who seeks to make the best use of their time to respond to six questions in one comment? This makes it hard to continue the discussion IMO. I don't know where to start and it'd take me an hour to finish.