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by 80386 2013 days ago
What's the merit in distinguishing between bias and factual misinformation?

The Westboro Baptist Church could start a news outlet and report on every single time a gay man did something wrong or immoral. They wouldn't need to make anything up - there are a lot of gay men in the world. But would this be morally acceptable?

1 comments

It would be morally questionable, but it should definitely be their right to do exactly such a thing if that's their particular bias. It would be factual too, though with an extremely biased construction, which should itself also be their right.

To give a much more politically correct example of the very same thing, the media harps enormously on most cases of whites committing violence against black individuals. To do so is generally basically factual but the degree to which it is done without giving context can create an enormous slant to a more contextually nuanced situation.