[MarkusQ]

The problem isn't that news outlets favor the wrong side (as TFA seems to assert) but that they favor any side at all. Once they abandon the attempt to report the facts and start trying to shape public opinion, they're going to get caught in a tug-of-war and eventually torn to shreds.

[add-sub-mul-div]

It's very cable-news-brained to believe there always have to be two sides that are equally viable and that the only respectable unbiased stance is in the middle, dragged by the Overton window wherever it happens to go.

[toolazytologin]

It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.

[kibwen]

I'm not sure if I'd call the above comment cable-news-brained, but it's entirely possible to push a misleading or outright false narrative while only presenting factually true statements. Remember, nearly everyone who's ever died has had a history of exposure to dihydrogen monoxide.

[maratc]

Not only that: it's impossible to report on everything that happened, so any outlet only reports on the important stuff. What is and what isn't considered important is a matter of bias, too.

[AnimalMuppet]

All true. But you can choose what and how you report in order to give one side a boost, or you can choose what and how to report in order to give the best, most accurate picture you can of what's actually going on. The difference matters.

Yeah, nobody ever does it perfectly. But trying to do it right rather than trying to do it wrong surely means that you'll come closer to doing it right.

[throw0101c]

> It’s very cable-news-brained to believe there must be sides at all. Report facts and let the readers form their own opinions.

"Feelings don't care about your facts." — not Ben Shapiro

Who won the 2020 US presidential election? If viewers think it was A and you report that it was B, will they believe you? Will they continue to watch/read you? If not, what does that do to your revenue and ability to pay your bills?

As Jason Zweig wrote:

> There are three ways to make a living: 1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. 2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. 3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

* https://jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/

[laughing_man]

I would love a paper like that. Don't tell me what to think -- just tell me what happened yesterday.

[edot]

Thousands of newsworthy things happened yesterday. Which ones do you put on the front page?

You don’t have to put a spin on the news to bias it. You just report or fail to report the news that goes or doesn’t go with your agenda.

[laughing_man]

We have the internet now, so column inches isn't a constraint. Give it all to me.

[r721]

Maybe this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

[throw0101c]

> We have the internet now, so column inches isn't a constraint. Give it all to me.

But reporters' time and effort are still a constraint.

And if you spend (more) time on story A but readers are interested in B and don't generate review via views/clicks, that affects the ability to pay your bills.

[9dev]

So, facts, huh.

Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?

Were the events in Palestine of 1948 a catastrophe, the violent expulsion of the Palestinian people from their home country, or was it a heroic effort by the Israelis to establish a homestead after the horrible experience of the Shoah?

Is Russia freeing the upstanding people of Ukraine from a tyrannical Nazi regime, or attacking a foreign country out of imperialistic greed?

You will find many groups of people are absolutely certain that one side of these examples is the objective truth.

[bigstrat2003]

> Was Donald Trump leading a violent group of traitors and looters to desecrate the capitol, or did he and thousands of others peacefully protest against the Democrats stealing the election?

Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts. The facts are that Donald Trump posted on social media encouraging people to fight the election results (or something to that effect, I don't have an exact quote to hand), and that a group of people were protesting and then went past the security barrier to enter the Capitol. You can interpret those facts in different ways (as your question shows), but either interpretation admits the same facts.

As one of my favorite youtube creators, Feral Historian, put it: "Most of the time, people equate the facts and their particular way of connecting them. Most political arguments are about the lines, not the dots. We think our opponents are ignoring the facts when they're just seeing different relationships between them". I think he's spot on with this observation, and one must be extremely careful to delineate between objective fact and the conclusions one draws based on facts. The latter are not objective, even if we feel very strongly that they are obviously correct.

[throw0101c]

> Neither of those is a matter of fact, but rather interpretation of the facts.

Let us try something simpler: is the world round or flat?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_beliefs

[9dev]

That’s exactly my point: You present yet another alternative view as facts, which would get debated by the former two groups. There is no authority to establish which of the three views is the canonical truth, regardless of how much you think your own is obviously and objectively true.

[bigstrat2003]

I deliberately tried as hard as possible to phrase the things I said in such a way that either of the groups you proposed would find no objection to my saying those things were true. Perhaps I failed in some way, but I don't think I did. My point is that we can indeed agree upon some facts as to what happened, but that those are not what people argue over. They argue over an interpretation of the facts that tells some story about who is the "good guy" and the "bad guy", but not the facts themselves. And in my experience, that is generally the form of all disputes over "facts": they are very rarely actual disagreements on what events happened, but rather disagreements about why they happened or if it was acceptable for those things to happen.

[jeffbee]

The newspaper industry has never been neutral. It has always been on the side of its owners. Whether that surfaced as warmongering, real estate hucksterism, flogging migration, reforming the entire nation to accommodate the car, or inventing white flight, newspapers always stood on the side of their owners' profits, not from the newspaper itself but from the owners' actual lines of business.

[calvinmorrison]

Journalists have always pretended to be some sort of righteous class. Upon closer examination you'll find they always are focused on conveying certain facts and steering the conversation. This is mostly a self perpetuated mythological construction that is not related to reality.

[akimbostrawman]

they just can't help themselves as they see themselves above the regular public that needs to be educated. same can be said about the modern science community that has been thoroughly ideologically captured.

[calvinmorrison]

I feel nothing but schadenfreude.

[9dev]

I don’t understand this sentiment. Journalists are humans too, with their own opinions that invariably shape their work. That doesn’t invalidate all their work though, and it’s vital for a democracy to have a spectrum of opinions floating around, and citizens getting in contact with that spectrum.

Big newspapers and media outlets are the only institutions able and persistent enough to dig through things like the Epstein files. With them going down, we loose yet another guardrail, some more checks and balances.

[akimbostrawman]

I remember how vital they where in shaping public opinion with WMD. Truly a win for democracy.

Journalism for quite sometime has little to do with informing and more manipulating. If not for money then political/personal agendas. Sadly for most people it's only clear in retrospect.

[hobs]

Fox News seems to be going strong, so I don't think this holds - we see the rise of the right wing shady and sloppy news dominating the market because its cheap, fast, and appeals to the public's basal natures. No tug of war there, they do not care about integrity or reporting and thus make bank.

[jauntywundrkind]

Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.

If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly. That party is acting against the spirit of what journalism ought to be about, and is making itself a traitor to democracy, the people, and journalists.

The WaPo lost significant double digit percent of subscribers because it spiked a Kamala endorsement. That was a clear and obvious and correct position to take, and that favoring was objectively clear a choice. Sitting on the fence pretending like both parties are equal is a great misdeed sometimes. Your obligation as journalists does include assessing & grasping a situation; it's more than being a steganographer for both sides, it does mean actually considering and helping shape opinion to steer people away from lies and misportrayals, it involves reminding people of whatever downsides they are at length.

[MarkusQ]

> Wrong. Journalists have an obligation to favor the truth.

I'm not sure why you think we're disagreeing on this part. I'm explicitly asserting that they need to seek truth rather than pushing an agenda.

> If a party is not being honest or truthful, they should disfavor that party very strongly.

Here though, we do disagree. I think they should call out the lies and provide explicit, verifiable evidence that they are in fact lies. The should counter lies with truth.

But they should be blind to "parties" and not favor or disfavor anyone. From that point on you're drifting into "and they should agree with me, and say so" thinking. They should not be helping "shape opinion" and "steer people" even in a direction you happen to like today.

If the facts don't do the job, they shouldn't put their thumbs on the scale.

[amiga386]

Truth or not, newspapers fund themselves by flattering their readers' opinions.

Paper 1, which prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how X is fucking over Y and X is clearly evil, gets a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support Y.

Meanwhile, paper 2 prints only truthful and legally fact-checked stories about how Y is fucking over X and Y is clearly evil, getting a lot of paid subscriptions from people who support X.

The real truth is that X and Y both do good things and bad things, and always take the opportunity to fuck each other over, leaving plenty of factually correct material for the partisan journals, who just don't bother reporting all the skullduggery their "own side" gets up to.

[alwa]

I guess the hope is that, in a healthy media ecosystem, anything important enough to have a constituency gets reported truthfully and legally fact-checked by somebody.

The public are still free to care which truthful things they care about (or want to pay attention to)—and part of the job of politics is still to try to direct attention toward aspects of truth that favor your political aims. But with sufficiently many truth-motivated reporting organs reflecting sufficiently many constituencies, the work of truth-finding gets done.

That, I think, is the loss.

[MarkusQ]

Sadly, this is true.

Journalists presenting the whole story would be wonderful, but I don't think we're likely to see it soon.