[drewrv]

A news organization that chased “diversity of opinion” would not be a good news organization.

Some opinions are not worth entertaining. If NPR were broadcasting the rantings of flat earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and anti-vax weirdos, it may be entertaining but it wouldn’t be news.

Also: the reason DEI initiatives ignore “diversity of political views” is because that is not a trait you are born with.

[josephg]

Sure; but its a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Its true that I don't want any of my news to come from flat earthers. But if all of my news (or all of my friends) share the same set of political biases, I'll end up wrong about important things and unable to connect with people around me.

Its a balancing act. Like every balancing act, you can fail on both sides - by being too open minded (and believing Alex Jones or whatever), or by being too closed minded.

I think if you live in a country where half of the population has some particular view of the world, you're being a bad democratic citizen if you don't take the time to understand that point of view.

[drewrv]

I agree, but the solution is to consume a variety of news sources rather than expecting some perfect formula from one.

[josephg]

Hoping that people consume a variety of news sources sounds naively optimistic to me. And when a single news station 100% caters to their audience's biases, you end up in situations like Fox News knowingly lying to their audience over the idea that the election was stolen. (If they told the truth as they saw it, they would have lost viewers. So they chose to back Trump's lie.)

I think its much healthier when news sources actively struggle against the pressure to be an echo chamber. And be self aware enough to know their own biases & make them clear to their readers. I also like hearing the reasonable arguments against their position: "We endorse candidate A, but here are some reasonable criticisms of A that their opponents bring up."

The Economist does this. Other commenters in this thread mention the New York Times does this. Generally, I want to follow journalists who know more about the topic than I do, and can help me see a bigger picture.

[astrange]

> Also: the reason DEI initiatives ignore “diversity of political views” is because that is not a trait you are born with.

Is that true? You're born from your parents[0]. I don't think it's actually much of an important distinction that you would have different socialization if you were adopted. Younger LGBTQ/NB people don't agree with this nearly as much as they used to, for instance. Several of those groups are just things you decide to do.

[0] as the vice president said: https://twitter.com/brownskinthem/status/1712665740069724184

[AnthonyMouse]

> If NPR were broadcasting the rantings of flat earthers, Sasquatch hunters, and anti-vax weirdos, it may be entertaining but it wouldn’t be news.

Surely you can see the difference between airing the view that it's reasonable and expected for the modern IRS to have significantly fewer employees per capita than they did before the advent of computers, and airing the view that autism is caused by Lizardmen.

[specialist]

No?

Computers can do audits and litigate cases now?

[AnthonyMouse]

Computers remove the need to have an army people to open envelopes and file all of the tax returns of the many millions of people who aren't getting audited and now file electronically, and electronically process payments or tax refunds, and validate the numbers on each tax return against the 1099s and W2s submitted by employers to make sure they match etc. All of these things used to be done by hand and it should certainly not require anywhere near as much labor to do them electronically.

[faeriechangling]

Honestly no, because cuts to the IRS have clearly and blatantly been motivated by lobbying and the desire to make the IRS less effectual at tax collection.

The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.

there's a number of reasonable "defund the IRS" arguments I could entertain, such is "tax collection is bad", but the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so. The cuts were directly agitated for by lobbying groups like CEETA, of which Microsoft is a member, Microsoft having a massive pending IRS tax case.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Honestly no, because cuts to the IRS have clearly and blatantly been motivated by lobbying and the desire to make the IRS less effectual at tax collection.

The other side of this coin is that every time the IRS audits anyone, they have to incur significant uncompensated costs to deal with the audit even if they've done nothing wrong. Anyone subjected to this obviously and reasonably is not going to like it, and allowing the government to convert all of the efficiency gains from computerization into more staff to impose those costs on innocent people is not inherently the right thing to do.

> The vast majority of the contemporary debate revolves around the defunding of the IRS's legal team and their ability to hire external council, and the observed fact that they have been pursuing less and less tax cases over time against large companies in particular.

How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.

> the idea that computers simply means the cuts in IRS employees is "reasonable and expected" just ain't so.

If they had N employees doing audits and M employees doing clerical work, and now computers mean they only need 10% as many employees to do clerical work, it is completely reasonable to say that they should now be able to do the same work as before with 10% as many clerical employees because that is what happened.

[faeriechangling]

>How many staff they have and who they target with those resources are two separate issues.

They may be two separate issues, but they are two interconnected issues, as with limited legal resources its more profitable to audit average people than to audit the wealthy who can evidently hold you up in court for decades, whereas with more legal resources there's more of an incentive to go after the high-hanging fruit since you'll already have the low-hanging fruit covered and have exhausted their resources already.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's the "having exhausted their resources already" which is the problem.

Suppose the IRS can audit a thousand small businesses and they recover more from this than their own costs. But at the same time most of the small businesses are innocent, and the audits collectively cost them several times as much as the IRS "profits". This is not a socially beneficial undertaking because the net costs across society exceed the net benefits, even if it has higher margins to the IRS than auditing large companies.

If you specifically want the IRS to target large companies then you can have them do that regardless of whether the margin of that to the IRS is less lucrative than the behavior that imposes more uncompensated costs on smaller businesses.

[faeriechangling]

Maybe give them a collar and throw them a bone in the same legislation? I feel strongly like large companies have successfully lobbied and propagandised to conflate funding the IRS enough to effectually go after their rampant tax evasion with hurting small businesses.

It's not really all that hard to earmark a certain amount of IRS funds to only go after companies over XX size. I think this is actually essential under neoliberalism because one of the fatal flaws of neoliberalism is giving large companies more wealth & power and then expecting to be able to tax that back to fund the welfare state, which generally falls on its face as you've just given large companies all the wealth and power in the world to stop that from even happening. If neoliberalism is to survive as a political ideology and for us to not end up adopting socialism (which is bureaucratic and corrupt and inefficient), it's sort of essential that organisations like the IRS have a decent amount of power and for them to direct that power at large institutions.

[jimbokun]

NPR flat out got some stories wrong due to their biases.

[vkou]

Everyone does. Even as a baseline of "Things that almost all members of it can agree on", our society is incredibly biased in how it views the world.

So is every other society in history. I'm sure ancient Greeks were convinced that they had it all figured out, too.

Fish don't have a word for water. Spend a significant part of your life immersed in a society with a radically different worldview, and it'll be very clear just how arbitrary team blue/red complaints about bias are.

You don't actually want unbiased reporting. It would be either useless, or make you extremely uncomfortable all the time. You're just unhappy that it's got the wrong bias.

[jimbokun]

The New York Times is an example of a liberal news organization that does a much better job of checking their biases to get their stories right.

[drewrv]

Probably. Every news organization gets stories wrong. That’s why reputable news sites issue corrections: https://www.npr.org/corrections/