[logicalmonster]

> and not just acting as advocates for one issue or another.

I think one clear lesson of the last few years should be that every human being has their biases. Trying to provide unbiased and objectively accurate information about things that are in nature often very nuanced and subjective is a foolhardy endeavor. Even with the big technology firms trying to provide "independent fact checkers", there's no way to accurately gauge truth on social media without essentially picking one point-of-view and censoring other perspectives.

Instead, taking into account human bias should be part of the system. Take ProjectVeritas as one example. I think that it's great that they're biased and argue their own point-of-view as long as their bias is known by people. That way you can take that into account when judging how likely something is to be true. I'd love it if there were more organizations like ProjectVeritas with their own biases who worked to expose corruption on issues they care about regardless of political perspective.

IMO, the worst situation to be in for determining truth is the one we're in with the media now where we have journalists who are playacting at being unbiased who clearly have a point of view they push for.

[throwawaysleep]

ProjectVeritas is about manufacturing traps, not any real kind of investigation.

[joecool1029]

Good journalism should try to challenge or at least knock the subjects out of their comfort zone in order to slip from their script. I think that's the main complaint anyone paying attention has with large media organizations (that they are just retweeting/reblogging press releases and propaganda).

Unfortunately Project Veritas goes further than just trying to challege their subjects and instead manufactures their own 'truth' out of manipulated b-roll. Sourced document of some of the claims they've manufactured: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/media/2018/projectve...

[egberts1]

an essential tools to uncovering the truth.

[rnk]

Project veritas is less than worthless. Anytime they have a story or video you can guarantee they took any info, including video, and mis-edited it to convey something that didn't happen. It's another grift to get money from people who pay for supposed false facts.

[logicalmonster]

I probably shouldn't have mentioned ProjectVeritas because many people instantly go into "sports team" mode and ignore the main point, but I wanted to point out how understanding a media entity's bias is a good thing and I used them as an example of a media entity that has a well-understood bias.

My greater point is that any media entity's work only conceivably presents a barrier to accurately understanding the world if you don't understand that they have a point of point of view they advocate for.

If you know that ProjectVeritas has a point of view that they advocate for and lean towards one side of the political aisle or the other, then you can take that information into account when gauging the accuracy of their stories and the likelihood that they're not presenting the facts accurately. ProjectVeritas presents no danger to the world even if their stories are always 100% wrong precisely because their bias is well-known and understood; and the visceral reaction to them here very clearly indicates that their bias is well-known.

The real risk comes when a media entity claims to be objective and unbiased when this should be understood to be impossible: no human being has zero bias.

[acdha]

> If you know that ProjectVeritas has a point of view that they advocate for and lean towards one side of the political aisle or the other, then you can take that information into account when gauging the accuracy of their stories and the likelihood that they're not presenting the facts accurately. ProjectVeritas presents no danger to the world even if their stories are always 100% wrong precisely because their bias is well-known and understood

That’s how it’s supposed to work but in practice it’s messier: not everyone is fully informed and following these stories, and context is often stripped as a story is promoted to other levels of media. The fairly large fraction of people who only read the headline probably don’t make it 6 paragraphs in where the reporter at a larger journal mentions the original source, or have the context to realize that the dueling quotes they’re presenting were all inspired by a dubious outrage-bait story rather than something real.

[logicalmonster]

> not everyone is fully informed

I don't want to seem mean-spirited to anybody, but the crowd of people who aren't capable of even understanding ProjectVeritas' bias is completely useless to any serious discussion or debate of ideas that advances the understanding of the world. So why should society harm the debate between the capable people by catering to the least common denominator that will never contribute anything of worth in this domain?

[_-david-_]

You do know they release the full unedited video as well...

[hotpotamus]

If you consider ProjectVeritas as a positive example of investigation into corruption, who would you consider a poor example?