[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...