[jjk166]

There's nothing wrong with being partisan. Bias is inevitable but you can still be biased and correct. Known biases can be compensated for so long as the source is otherwise principled.

The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness. While luckily it's rare major media sources to just straight up fabricate false claims, fact checking has become virtually non-existent. Parroting the reporting of other journalists word for word is considered acceptable, and it has become common to see articles cite "according to another paper's anonymous sources." Articles get stuffed with filler disguised as context which often gets filtered as it gets rereported to cut out important details. Retractions are rare, and never prominent despite the clear prioritization of publishing quickly over taking the time to write a well researched article. They've also noticed its cheaper and easier to put the words "breaking news" in front of a headline which by no measure is than to actually go out and find urgent stories.

The partisanship and hyperpolarization is simply there to kind of cover up the laziness. Someone questions my lack of evidence? They're just a sea-lioning troll with an obvious partisan goal. Lots of other sites disagree with me? Clearly they're just shills. Someone points out I don't know the difference between a russian and a ukrainian? How would you know unless you're a russian bot! The gibberish of a monkey with a typewriter would be defended if the monkey had the right political leanings. We accept the shortcomings of many institutions because the ends justify the means, even though those ends could have been achieved with better means.

[tzs]

> The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness.

After Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, I heard a discussion on NPR where they talked about failures of the coverage of the primaries [1]. There were a lot of candidates in the Republican primaries: besides Trump there was Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and a few others.

The reporters in the field covering each candidate would send in items, both positive and negative, about all the candidates.

For all the candidates except Trump, they were seeing about the same ratio of positive to negative. For Trump, the ratio of positive things he did/said to negative things was quite a bit lower than that of other candidates.

The editors and producers had an implicit assumption that all candidates would be about the same in this regard and so killed a lot of the negative Trump items so as to keep in line with the number of negatives for the other candidates.

It wasn't until after Trump had locked up the nomination that they realized that Trump really did do/say more negative newsworthy things than the others, and that in trying to avoid bias or the appearance of bias they had actually introduce a pro-Trump bias.

[1] For those not familiar with the US system, each major party holds elections to determine who its nominees will be, and then those nominees compete with the nominees from the other parties in the general election.