[idle_zealot]

There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests?

Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.

[boplicity]

Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible.

This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.

Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.

[jvalencia]

There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.

[DennisP]

It's not like the one comment is the only newsworthy thing that day. It's a big complicated world with so many important things happening that we can't possibly keep up. It'd be easy to fill up the news with a tiny fraction of them, instead of picking one or two facts and spouting lots of opinions about them. Doing the latter is just a choice they've made.

[ElevenLathe]

Reporting novel facts is expensive. You need a travel budget, a widely-dispersed bureau network, a good research department, highly motivated journalists, and the list goes on. Opinions about existing facts are much cheaper to produce.

[techblueberry]

While I understand why this is true, there are degrees and even if there are subtle ways in which article selection and etc define bias, it would be nice to read something where the intended bias was to present the facts as unbiased as possible. Like I want to read where someone tried to do that even if they failed because that’s the nature of the kind of writing I want to read. A publication that avoids overt editorialization.

Maybe what I really want is a paper heavily biased towards multiple academic perspectives, and less towards populist coverage.

[pibaker]

What makes academic perspectives less biased than populist ones? Getting an phd does not immunize you against bias. And as bad as populist reporting may be, it is at least more representative of your fellow citizens' opinions.

[techblueberry]

That’s what I said, I want reporting heavily biased towards diverse academic perspectives.

Why do I care about my fellow citizen’s opinions? I feel like I’m drowning in my fellow citizens opinions.

Maybe I read the news for different reasons than other people. Why do you read the news?

[nathan_compton]

What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?

The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Many people think you should avoid having bias.

What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers. That's the way forward to getting more accurate, critical coverage of interests we dislike.

We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.

[thunky]

> What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers.

The news is exactly what the public demands: garbage.

If we really wanted good journalism we'd have it.

[chromacity]

But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.

The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.

[boplicity]

I think Fox News is a good example, because their public messaging has always been "fair and balanced" while at the same time blatantly have a bias; this is just one aspect of how they are clearly deceptive. If instead of calling themselves "fair and balanced" they said they were all about "the Republican Perspective on News" they would immediately be more honest, and it would be easier to understand them as an organization, especially for the people who are regularly deceived by them right now.

I'm not arguing that we should try to exaggerate our biases, or even to center them, but rather, we can become more honest by making our biases clear and explicit to those we're communicating with. Many organizations avoid openly addressing their biases, which makes them less honest overall, and more prone to being deceptive. If you're aware of your biases you can actually account for them, as opposed to letting them blind you. Further, if you're public with that awareness, others can account for them as well, and be less likely to be deceived (even accidentally) by your communication.

Too often, bias is ignored. It always exists. If we name it and make it visible, then we can have a chance at reducing its potential for deception.

[Auracle]

To be fair, my assumption on that line was always that they were saying they're balancing out the overall news world. Still dirty, of course. Regardless, everyone knows how they lean.

What grinds my gears is NPR. Every member drive they explicitly talk about how their coverage is fair and unbiased, which is way more egregious than some tagline. As far as having a bias and not owning up to it, I think they're the worst offenders right now.

[bitbiter]

Respectable journalism calls this an "editorial stance".

The Wall Street Journal has always been openly conservative in their bias that is most on display in editorials while they maintain a high quality, generally center-right news reporting division.

Similarly the Economist describe their stance as "radically centrism", which sounds a little strange but they outline it pretty well and are open about it.

[nyeah]

On the other hand, some claim that biased news sources can be misleading.

[UtopiaPunk]

I would call into the question the notion that an "unbiased" news source is even possible. What is that? Even in a hypothetical, entirely objective coverage an event, the news publication must decide whether to give such coverage time and space as compared to other stories. That time/space is balanced against corporate advertising and the corporate interests that own the publication (or the government grants, or the subscribers, or whatever the funding is). Choosing to cover or not cover something is bias, before the news article even exists.

[boplicity]

This often happens when the news source is not honest about their biases, or if they don't make their biases clear. Fox News is the classic example: Their tagline is "fair and balanced," but their clear objective is to present the Republican/Conservative side of the story. This dishonesty about their bias is at the core of their credibility problems, though, to be clear, it does work in terms of effectively deceiving many people.

[socalgal2]

the bias is extremely thick but more subtle on NPR, This American Life, Radiolab, Science Friday, etc. Sometimes they claim to cover both sides of an issue but their belief / agenda is clear in how they frame and respond to one side the other and how much time they give

[thwarted]

Sometimes a given presentation is called biased but it's not that the reporting is biased but that the actual event is or the source material is biased or lacking. "Dog bites man" is not biased against the dog if they don't or can't get the dog's take. And if they do get the dog's take and the dog wastes everyone's time by ranting/barking about cats and they don't print it, it's not the reporting that's biased, the dog squandered its chance to offer its perspective on the topic at hand.

Sometimes there is no "other side" or the other side offers meaningless contribution. The trend to present oneself as unbiased have often given platforms to voices that are not worthy of having a platform, for whatever reason, and someone needs to make a call, and they should be transparent about it. Are they not giving time because they choose to ignore legitimate and useful information or because giving someone a platform to rehash all the bogus reasons that the moon landing was faked again isn't worth it (to use an extreme example). Moon landing deniers can set up their own web site to push their faked moon landing agenda, they don't need to clutter up everyone else's content with their nonsense in the name of "unbiased reporting".

[socalgal2]

I'm talking about things like say "rent control" (just an example). NPR's and related programs, the core creators arguably believe in it. If they have a segment on it they'll gloss over any evidence that it's a net negative. They'll present it as a solution, talk up how awesome it is through a 20 minute segment with positive words and excited attitudes. "IF" they ask someone about possible negatives they'll kept it short and surround it with questions and attitudes of "don't trust this person" and "dismiss this counter evidence". Then they'll end with some sob story about the people rent control helps.

It's the same for 100s of other topics on which there is strong arguments to be made that the proposal will have the opposite of the intended outcome.

[afavour]

I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.

[idle_zealot]

I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary?

What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.

[autoexec]

I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.

[idle_zealot]

> You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people

That's the structural problem in a nutshell right there. If you're principled enough to do that, then you're at a disadvantage compared to others who are willing to play the access journalism game and the like. You can try to make it up by using your transparency and high standards to attract readers, but in the marketplace that strategy loses.

We've seen this play out. Respected news orgs stand on principle, take a hit but manage to get by on a perception of integrity. Eventually leadership shifts to gradually be more and more business-focused, justifying every step as good for readers and investors, speaking first about the delicate balance between integrity and reach and sustainability. Eventually these words become platitudes as more power shifts to those more interested in profit and power games than in anything the institution was founded on. Every step and every change along the way seems reasonable enough, prudent, even.

That's the trap you need to defend against. I don't know how you do that as a business, though. Setting yourself up as a nonprofit might help stave it off, but even that doesn't seem foolproof.

[techblueberry]

I think part of the problem is - what I imagine most educated people want(maybe I’m wrong) when they talk about this “diverse group of editors” is this like classically liberal view that is actually incredibly narrow when one looks at the range of more populist perspectives. Like thefp.com is probably somewhat close to what you describe but is the exact opposite of what I’m looking for.

What I want is this theoretical set of educated perspectives that claim to represent a broad range of views; when an actual broad range of views is more likely to include pizzagate than Burkian conservatism..

Maybe thefp.com would be a good starting point to ask - why is that not what you’re looking for? If you squint your eyes it provides a balanced perspective.

[autoexec]

> Maybe thefp.com would be a good starting point to ask - why is that not what you’re looking for?

It's a bit hard to judge the site since it doesn't show full articles, but it does seem to be supporting only one side of at least some narratives. For example, I didn't see any article on the genocide in gaza that wasn't denying its existence. That particular issue aside, my overall impression is that it probably does what many left leaning news sites do: try to remain factually accurate in what it says while only presenting one side of the story and neglecting stories on anything that doesn't forward their narrative. thefp.com is better than many other right leaning news sites since it isn't just outright lying all the time (no pizzagate), but it's not honest reporting or covering enough perspectives. I might have just checked it at a bad time but it also seems very heavy on opinion instead of actual news or investigative reporting. It's got a lot to say about moms and politicians and celebrities but nothing about Nagatitan.

[lofaszvanitt]

What a shill comment :D.