Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Guardian and the Snowden Leaks
An anonymous reader writes "An interesting and thoughtful article in the New Yorker about the inner workings of the Guardian newspaper. It explains a lot about why the Snowden files ended up there and not elsewhere. Given all the snark on Slashdot about the sorry state of modern journalism, it is well worth a read to see one organization that got it right. An illustrative quote about Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor: 'He has a really useful piece of equipment that most editors don't have, which is a spinal column.' I would encourage everyone to read this, and if you support the type of journalism the Guardian has been engaging in, think about buying a subscription. The article also talks about the financial side of the newspaper business, and real journalism is not going to happen unless somebody pays for it."
Dear slashdotters, The Guardian is quickly becoming one of my preferred references. Can you help me broaden my horizons by naming other good newspapers? (English/French/Spanish language only sorry)
Very interesting read. The thing that shocks me the most is that there is still such extensive censorship going on around the world, including in the U.K.
" On Davies’s advice, Rusbridger took the unprecedented step of bringing in the New York Times as a partner. A British newspaper might be blocked from publishing, but an American outlet would have First Amendment protection."
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
The Guardian is a hard-left medium that has proven itself to be anti-American over the decades.
Your point being?
Oh right, you think america should be given respect for free instead of earning it through deed like everyone else has to.
The open question is what is a private citizen employed by a private company employed by an agency of a foreign power doing with access to British secrets. If Britain shares its secrets with foreign citizens then it seems only appropriate for the Guardian to share them with British citizens.
Korma: Good
So? You can be biased and still do good journalism. In fact, I'd say it's impossible not to be biased. Everyone is biased, it's human nature. Organizations can go some way to mitigating that bias but you'll never remove it entirely.
I read that line, and all I could think was, "Awww, you DID notice!"
...and then I realized it was an anon poster, not timothy himself.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
What do you expect from journalism?
As long as a story about Lindsay Lohans latest rehab draws ten times as much readers as some background article about the NSA spying capabilities while being less risky at the same time, the development is clear.
Do you really expect someone to risk the ire of that organisation that can dig (or make) up your dirtiest secrets in order to get less readers? You have to be an idealist or crazy (or preferably both) to do so.
And that's where you biffed it. The Guardian is as heavily biased as Fox News is. But you tend not to see biases towards things you agree with as clearly as things you disagree with, so I forgive your temporary bout of insanity in making that statement. Maybe they got this one instance right, maybe not. An entire slashdot thread has been created just so we can scream at, er, I mean, debate, the veracity of that statement. But... the Guardian is biased. Sorry man.
You don't have to be a post-modernist to agree that all media (hell, everyon) is biased. However, I don't think it is fair to compare the bias of the Guardian with the bias of Fox News. There are degrees.
Everyone has an opinion but reporters are to report the news . They should be like the wildlife cinematographers of old. No interference just pure animal life anything less is fake. I don't want to pay for opinions that what i read Slashdot for and watch MSNBC or CNN. Far too much opinionated. This is all IMO but i have seen the news change for the worse over the years.
Jack of all trades,master of none
ObDisclaimer: I happen to like the Guardian.
So? You can be biased and still do good journalism.
That is the third-most stupid thing I have read on slashdot this week; And this week has been particularly harsh on my brain meats. While the literal definition of journalism, "the activity or profession of writing for newspapers or magazines or of broadcasting news on radio or television," does not include mention of the ethics of journalism, I expect people to have a grasp on it. As you do not, I shall now dispense a brief explanation of why it's so important.
Democracy can only function well with an educated populace. You simply can't vote the most capable candidate into office unless you know the issues, and that means knowing facts. Not interpretation of them. Not skewed versions of them. Not partial lists of them. You need to know everything about it, or you're not making an informed decision, you're making a decision based on propaganda and lies. When your audience is millions of Americans, your voice carries a lot of power. With great power comes great responsibility. And anyone who passes off their own biases as fact is not a supporter of Democracy and I do not want them on my team.
In fact, I'd say it's impossible not to be biased. Everyone is biased, it's human nature. Organizations can go some way to mitigating that bias but you'll never remove it entirely.
Your argument is that because we can't be perfect at something, we shouldn't even try. This is such a classic mistake we've given it a formal name: The Nirvana Fallacy. And yes martha, there is a wikipedia on it.
Organizations can go some way to mitigating that bias but you'll never remove it entirely.
The institution of science does a pretty good job of limiting the effects of bias. Oh yes, you can point out the problems. Oh yes, they're very real. But compared to say... Fox News, they're doing a pretty good job. There's a reason scientists have been alternately revered and burned a the stake throughout history -- it's because of their stubborn devotion to the truth regardless of religious or political preference. And that stubborn devotion has catapulted forward all of humanity from banging rocks together to make fire and foraging for food, and sleeping in caves, to all the modern conveniences you have before you.
So I see your nilhism and perfectionism and raise you... rationality. Your move, Internet.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
One of the side effects of the rise of the blogging hordes is the death of traditional journalism. Even if old media is biased one way or another, the decent newspapers of record have some respect for journalistic integrity. Reporting on a government corruption scandal is very different from reporting on the latest iPhone over at Engadget or the endless stream of celebrity garbage "news." Seeking out the real story from actual, verifiable sources rather than a blogger posting their own opinion as fact is the difference. While I'm sure some bloggers are journalists in the traditional sense, not all are, and blogs are even more sensitive to producing content that makes people click than newspapers are.
Some people may cite this as anti-progress, but look at media prior to the Internet, in fact, before cable TV. There were only 3 network news sources, and a few newspapers of record producing content. Now there's tons of media outlets, thousands of random bloggers, and an increasing trend of the medial outlets crowdsourcing content from their readers (CNN iReport, etc. etc.) Having so many choices means that opinions are more diverse, but conversely it also means that it narrows people's viewpoints. Conservatives are Fox News fans, but they're also fans of even more conservative bloggers. It makes liberals more liberal and conservatives more conservative, and that leads to situations like we're in today with Congress and the Tea Party faction. You would never have something like this in the 50s/60s simply because the population didn't have enough customized hot-button content to whip them into whatever polarized frenzy they're into.
Traditional journalism does need to return to media, but as the submitter states, you have to pay for it, and integrity doesn't pay the bills like the latest unverified rumor from a friend of a friend of Lindsey Lohan...
I don't think it is fair to compare the bias of the Guardian with the bias of Fox News. There are degrees.
I gotta say, they're just as biased as Fox News, just differently biased since they are from a different country with a different political landscape. If you're looking for less-biased news from the UK, the gold standard example is the BBC. And once you've seen good reporting, then it should be pretty obvious that The Guardian is heavily biased.
The problem with the BBC is that their abhorrence for bias can lead to excessive caution.
The Guardian is as heavily biased as Fox News is.
No. Fox News is far more unbalanced. The Guardian is middle left from a european point of view and Fox News would be far right. And there is one other point. You can be biased and write smart stuff. One of them does, the other...?
You could go so far as to say that if a news outlet claims to be free from bias, they probably aren't doing journalism. Because they probably mean that they present "balanced" stories, meaning not neutral, reality-based stories, but rather stories that always present two and only two sides to an issue, even if the only proponent for one side is an obvious idiot or crook, and even when there are four sides with equally valid points to make.
The BBC is great, but they are just as biased as any news outfit. Their bias tends to be toward a sort of civilized middle-of-the-road establishment view, but it's a mistake to think that that is not a bias.
www.ft.com
Their focus is mostly financial, but I really enjoy their world news reporting. Whenever I pick up a "normal" paper here, even (especially?) one of the "big" ones, it seems that they're trying to sell me an extreme viewpoint - and maybe some male enhancement products to go with it - rather than actually impart any information. The FT is much more reporting like I remember it used to be. Maybe because they actually charge enough for their paper to cover their costs.
cogito ergo dubito
I think he meant that reporters' biases will guide what they think is worth investigating, and therefore some may be less likely to cover certain areas of public or political life. As long as other reporters with different biases choose to cover those areas then that's actually good. Keeping all other things equal (training, talent, skill), those with passion for their work will tend to do a better job of it. However once their subject is chosen, those reporters' investigations may still be carried out and reported in a thorough and unbiased way despite their biases, if their professionalism is sufficiently high.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
The NTY has been riding the work of Woodward and Bernstein since Watergate. That was a long time ago, and now they are in the pocket of intrenched special interests, just like the rest of US journalism.
It's a sad day when no major new organization in the US can be counted on to stand up to external pressure, whether it be economic or political. It ironic that a newspaper in the UK is doing the heavy lifting in this case, since there is no constitutional protection of the press in England, and there is in the US.
Why is Snark Required?
If a Republican were in the White House, the NYT would have reported on this instantly and heavily. When Bush was in office, the NYT leaked confidential info that put our troops in danger. And look at the constant stream of stories they did on Abu Gharib and interrogation techniques. Why weren't they scared of the feds then?
The main reason the American media are holding back on this story is because Obama is currently in the White House.
So see it this way then: you conflate bias and variance, which is a big no-no in experimentation:
I don't dare to comment on others because I haven't read them often enough. The idea is that you can subtract or add YOUR perception of known bias to calibrate a signal to approximate what you think the real value is, but with high variance the signal is just too noisy to bother.
... odd.. why don't they call it Fox Entertainment then. Truth in advertising.
I have never seen more than soundbytes of Fox News, but is it true that a reporter had to claim that he was legally insane, in order to continue to spew lies without being called on it? I.E. "everybody knows its only entertainment, we don't claim to produce real news". That's just
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Everyone has an opinion but reporters are to report the news.
"Reporters reporting the news" is hardly immune to bias:
1. What is considered "the news" anyways? I think we can agree that "Planes Flown Into World Trade Center" is news, and "Area Man Posts Cat Video" is not, but how about "50 People Protest" versus "Double Homicide On Fleet St" versus "10 Brokers Convicted of Mortgage Fraud"?
2. Who do you talk to in order to understand the news story in question? For example, in discussions on Syria's chemical weapons, does your report mostly contain information from (a) the White House, (b) US Congressional opposition leadership, (c) the Kremlin, (d) the UN, (e) Bashar al-Assad's government, (f) Syrian rebels, (g) the Israeli government, etc, etc.
3. Who's information do you believe, if there is disagreement about something? Which sources do you challenge aggressively and which sources do you treat as fairly impartial observers? For example, on an economics story, do you accept a government report as truth if there's a competing report by another group, especially if that group has a political ax to grind?
4. Even if you've perfectly balanced issues 1, 2, and 3, what comes first in your report and what becomes the headline? For example, on 9/12/2001, many headlines in the US read "America Attacked", which was true but conveys a somewhat different story than "18 Terrorists Attack World Trade Center and Pentagon".
I am officially gone from
You can be biased and still do good journalism.
If you are aware of your bias and tell your reader, you are an excellent journalist.
If you are aware of your bias and do not tell about them, you are a propagandist
If you are unaware of your bias, you are a terrible journalist
If you do not have bias, you are not a human person
Alastair Cook used to explain it very well to non-US audiences via the BBC but he is sadly no longer with us. The gruesome footnote to him spending decades explaining the weirdness of American to the outside world is that his grave was robbed by people looking for artificial joints to sell into your utterly fucked up health system.
BBC and Fox often present the same message different ways. For example on foreign wars - BBC shows some children in caves, children are suffering - cold, hungry, afraid of bombings by pro-government forces and want to return to normal life. After successful campaign children miraculously disappear - like in Libya, where anarchy currently is so widespread that PM was recently kidnapped. But evil dictator is dead, so children must be ok now, sure :) Fox message is just like "He is an enemy of US, we will destroy him!" - more straightforward, less sickening.
I remember how those "think of the children" news are made - I was around 15 y.o. in Moscow, it was around 1992, presumably Japanese news channel (there was russian producer who told us that) filmed as as "Russian punks". They told us to come to building in our block that was scheduled for demolition, generously gave us each 2 packs of marlboro and some vodka, somebody brought a guitar. So we were to sing russian punk songs while drinking vodka from a bottle and smoking cigarettes, all this with broken windows and overall mess of a building scheduled for demolition as a background. I do not know if it was shown or not, if shown we could be orphans of war near dwelling, half destroyed by government aviation in Chechnya, or where it was needed at the moment.
I didn't claim that they are equally biased—I claimed that they shared the same quality of being biased. There is no way to compare bias in the sense that you mean, because it isn't a number, or even a vector. The idea that that is the right way to address the problem of poor journalism is a red herring.
Practices like starting from your bias and looking for facts to confirm it, and then writing the story around those facts, are common, and produce garbage. Practices like going and getting someone's take on the story without doing your own careful research, and then finding someone who disagrees with the first person you went to and presenting the story in the context of the disagreement between these two parties, implying that balance is to be found somewhere between their positions, also produce garbage. This is because this reporting is not being done by the reporter, but simply packaged up based on what a few sources have said about their own positions and each others' positions. So it's fairly useless for actually coming to any understanding about the topic.
What I do want is a news source that does actual reporting: asking experts, sure, but then fact-checking what they say. Not pitting the experts against each other, but testing their arguments, doing their best to figure out what's really going on, and then reporting on that, with as much information about how they arrived at their conclusion as possible. Then, even if they are biased, I can correct for that. If the input is garbage, the bias doesn't matter, because when you correct for it, you're still left with garbage.