Slashdot Mirror
Jimmy Wales' WikiTribune is Already Biased (theoutline.com)
Earlier this year, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said he would be launching a neutral news service with "no other agenda than this: the ultimate arbiter of the truth is the facts of reality." On Monday, a pilot version of WikiTribune went live. Adrianne Jeffries of The Outline argues that WikiTribune is already doing things that it said it wouldn't: As of this writing, WikiTribune's homepage featured a hodgepodge of news aggregation. The "editor's choice" module points to a news roundup that includes Paul Manafort's indictment, the Catalonian independence movement. [...] These stories are all sourced to fairly mainstream news outlets, including some that are on Wikipedia's preferred sources list such as CNN and Reuters, and some that are not, such as Politifact and "Spanish media." I admire what Wales is trying to do here. [...] But WikiTribune is bullshit. It's not new -- it is the same kind of news aggregation that exists all over the web. It is not better -- comparable summarizing and linking can be found on many websites, while original reporting of those same stories, often supplemented by linking to other reporting, can be found at CNN, Reuters, The New York Times, and the BBC, which WikiTribune uses as its primary sources. And finally, and most importantly, it is not neutral. The existence of the "Editor's choice" module, which highlights some stories over others, is not neutral; neither is the "Good reads" section, which does the same thing. The Manafort story includes a section, "Highlights from the indictment," which is not neutral -- someone had to decide which parts of the indictment were more significant than others. There is no such thing as an objective highlight. It is true that the wording of the story does not include adjectives, except when it quotes from the indictment ("lavish lifestyle," "false and misleading statements"), but this is standard newswriting, as one would get from the AP or the New York Times.
Sigh, it seems that a lot of people want to change the meaning of the word bias to "He said something I dont like and I'm butt hurt".
Having an opinion column in a news publication is not bias, bias in a news publication is deliberately skewing the facts, omitting relevant information, adding falsifications or other means to distort facts to suit your point of view. The point is, its deliberate and hidden al a Fox News, the Daily Mail or Russia Today. Unbiased news is presenting the facts and allowing the audience to make their own inferences.
Now reputable news organisations have opinion columns, but these are clearly marked as opinion. With many news agencies, the entire theme of the site changes to make it clear they are not presenting facts, but opinions... And there is nothing wrong with having opinion columns as long as they are clearly marked as such. Issues with bias in news start to occur when opinion is dressed up to masquerade as news.
This article is pretty much non-news, we cant even call it fake news its such a non event. Why, well the magical combination of "Wales", "Wiki" and "Bias" are the perfect thing to drag unwitting eyeballs to this site practically no-one has ever heard of. It was set up last year by some random dude who wanted to make a political blog, claiming to be biased but after about 2 minutes of reading it, it's clearly anti-Trump (and I can say that as someone who thinks Trump is the worst thing to happen to a country, worse than Brexit) and ladies and gents, let me save your eyeballs, the sites layout and colour scheme is atrocious. Its like Geocities for Web 2.0 and its an exclusively mobile setup, so looks even worse on a 24" 4K monitor.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It's a fairly standard attack used on all media. Set an impossibly high standard and berate them for not meeting it.
People with half a brain look for a more detailed criticism than "humans are involved, so it must be biased" and "they made one mistake, therefore everything they ever did or said is fake news". The goal is to prime people to accept alternative facts.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Crying about the Trump indictments doesn't make them less than real, sorry snowflake.
Uh, there is no Trump indictment.
There was an indictment of some people who worked on Trump's campaign-- most notably his former campaign manager. But the indictment was for stuff that they did before that-- 2008 to 2014, to be specific.
You need to start reading an unbiased news source. Try this one: http://www.politifact.com/trut...
30+ years ago, news organizations mostly stuck with *objectively reporting the news* rather than subtly leaving out certain parts of the story again and again and again to advance a chosen agenda, or constantly running rabid "opinion" pieces bordering on batshit-crazy levels of outrage.
See Yellow Journalism to understand that's not true at all. In particular, William Randolph Hearst is widely credited with helping to start a war to sell papers.
Nope, no sig
Which person are you talking about?
Paul Manifort was Trump's campaign manager.
George Papadopoulos was Trump's foreign policy advisor.
Rick Gates is a long-time business partner of Manifort for about 10 years. He worked as an aide to Manifort on the campaign.
All have Russian government connections. Papdopoulos pled guilty to lying to the FBI about those connections.
Manifort has had to register as a foreign agent of the Russian government.
As much as Trump, the Russian government and Trump's supporters scorn the investigation,
this is a serious scandal.
Hillary's election was basically certain based on the data available.
Actually, it wasn't "basically certain"-- the best analysis, by fivethirtyeight, based on the polling numbers and error margins gave her roughly 70% chance of winning. Here's the thing: one time in four, a 25% chance happens.
The polls turned out to be a bad tool.
If you paid attention to the error margins, the polls weren't as bad as they look in retrospect. Basically, Hillary's margin of victory was roughly equal to the error margin in the polls. People just ignored that-- they only looked at the final number, not the error
That doesn't make reporting on those polls biased. It just makes them incorrect.
There was a bias in reporting, though-- reporters took the polls and listened to the ones that agreed most with their preconceptions, and ignore the margins of error.