[crtccnt]

Which PBS are you watching because the PBS I've watched were just as biased and agenda pushing as for-profit privately funded news companies. To be fair, I haven't watched PBS in close to a decade and the nyc metro area PBS might be an outlier, but I find it hard to believe things have gotten better since the start of the decade. The same goes for NPR - I used to be a tote carrying member.

[cobbzilla]

McNeil/Lehrer News Hour (later just Jim Lehrer), and the Nightly Business Report were decent news programs, don’t remember a lot of bias, but I haven’t watched in a long while though.

[StuffedParrot]

There is no such thing as covering news without bias. Even the selection of which stories to cover is inherently political. I don’t terribly mind PBS but the idea that people sometimes float of unbiased media doesn’t even make sense to me.

[jasonjayr]

Agreed. And PBS's biases are well known. PBS shines in that most of the content is even tempered and well reasoned.

If I wanted a counterpoint to PBS's left-leaning biases, where could I find content with a right-leaning bias, that isn't sprinkled with religion, screaming hot heads, and other unpleasantness?

[StuffedParrot]

I would call PBS’s bias center to center-left, along with the nytimes, huffpost, the guardian, most late night shows, and most slate writers. It sounds like you are describing the wall street journal, bloomberg, the economist, the washington post. It’s pretty difficult to go further right without bumping into fox news, breitbart, the drudge report, the blaze, rush limbaugh, etc.

For actual left bias, see: the baffler, the intercept, jacobin, mother jones, counterpunch, the nation, and oddly teen vogue. If PBS is left, those are surely falling off the spectrum.

Finally podcasts cater across the spectrum. I can’t help with specific examples here, but you can certainly find anyone from anarchists and communists to democratic socialists to liberals to libertarians to blatant far right wing shit (monarchism?, “racial realists”, “trumpists”).

[boring_twenties]

You must be reading a different Bloomberg than I am.

[StuffedParrot]

What kind of economic critique do you have about Bloomberg?

[thanatropism]

> monarchists, racial realists, trumpists

One of those things is not like the others.

[StuffedParrot]

I honestly have no clue what you’re talking about.

[_delirium]

Depends a bit on what you mean by right-wing. The Economist is a fairly level-headed representative of center-right free-market economics, but they aren't cultural conservatives and quite secular. That makes their political positioning in the US a bit ambiguous, though they're more solidly right-of-center in the UK context where they originate. (For example: the only Labour candidate they've endorsed in 50 years is Tony Blair, and even that came with a caveat that they were endorsing him because they preferred "the ambiguous right-winger rather than the feeble one".)

On the U.S. side, intellectually oriented conservative media has really had trouble with the Trump era. The more highbrow outlets were never on board with Trump, but maintaining an anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical line on the U.S. right basically dooms you to irrelevance in the current climate, since only a smallish band of "never-Trumper" conservatives are still tuning in to that political position. There are a few of those, like The American Interest, which keep going on a small circulation.

[mixmastamyk]

Bill buckley and National review carried the flag for the intelligent right for years. Not sure how they are doing in the T era.

[raxxorrax]

There is. You can try to give a neutral perspective. It won't be perfect, but you can read a staunch difference between those who try and those who do not. And the information gain is vastly better if you read the former. It isn't even comparable, it is a whole other league. I cannot comment on PBS here.

Sure, the topics picked can very well be political, although that has degraded somewhat to topics that generate clicks. But that is nevertheless a huge problem and I believe correlated to the low trust in media overall.

Or look at elections. A press staunchly favoring a candidate wouldn't be able to hold that candidate accountable. That is another huge problem, because that is their primary raison d'être.

Some even go that far that a worse candidate is preferable in that situation if it means the press as representatives of the public reports critically. Could explain some things.

[StuffedParrot]

Neutral... between what? The financing and your reporters? That is the neutrality I am aware of.

[raxxorrax]

We could discuss what it means to give a neutral perspective, but I don't think that would get us anywhere to be honest.

The last discussion about that has been with fundamentalists that had a similar critique about neutrality.

We could also talk about how feasible it is to achieve neutrality. But that wouldn't be the point in most cases.

In secular education for example neutrality has a specific meaning. That pupils are to be empowered to make choices and that views are not imposed on them. End of story.

It isn't that hard to transfer these principles to journalism. Does journalism try to inform as best as possible so people can make better decisions? Or should they be nudged towards certain perspectives.

The former variant would be the neutral approach. Pretty simple if you think about it.

[StuffedParrot]

If PBS were trying to empower voters, they could easily report different news. You need to actually analyze their coverage to make any assertion about to what extent they empower their viewers with their news coverage. If I were to suggest stories, I would inevitably be labeled and discarded for the exact same reasons PBS refuses to cover the stories.

And btw, I agree with your definition of neutrality. I just don’t think PBS markedly improves in this respect (empowering viewers) from any other cable news station, they simply have less obnoxious production value and are therefore a more palatable, or at best equally palatable, version of the other center to center left publications I listed.

[roenxi]

There are a bunch of biases that are pretty safe to call good. For example, bias against intellectually dishonest ideas (best of social sciences). Or a bias towards peace and prosperity (pick your favourite, lots of people biased in this direction), or a bias towards mathematical correctness (eg, fivethirtyeight.com). Or a very clear mandate and a bias to fulfilling it honestly (eg, a homelessness focused charity that is relentlessly evidence driven).

There is a big gap between those sort of biases and Not-Trump-At-Any-Cost or Must-Sell-Public-Assets. Some biases are productive and have motivations which can be honestly articulated and are broadly reasonable.

[StuffedParrot]

Why is a center bias inherently better? You call it “pretty safe to call good”. That’s actually excellent framing: PBS (I should clarify, I refer specifically to the news hour) plays it safe and doesn’t report anything not on other comparable stations or news outlets, but they do it with an enormous amount of decorum.

That said, frontline occasionally covers things the news hour won’t and can be a serious investigative journalism outlet.

[roenxi]

If you read closely you'll observe that I'm not talking about the 'centre' (whatever that means, the word doesn't label a fixed set of things). I'm talking primarily about evidence based biases and secondarily biases towards being flexible and moderate.

It may be as many as 80% of the population would support evidence-based biases, in theory. There are still problems but it is a big step up from inflexible partisanship.

[StuffedParrot]

I believe I replied to the wrong comment; I agree with your assessment about biases. I meant it as a neutral term, I would ideally like the biases to align with my own.