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.

Comments

CNN?

[msauve]

CNN hasn't been news for a long, long time. It's all editorial punditry about the news, which seems to be the only way they can find to fill a 24 hour channel. (same with Fox and MSNBC, and most others).

Re:CNN?

[Ksevio]

While that is very often the case, a lot of actual news does come from CNN, even if it's packed in with mindless commentary.

Re:CNN?

[OverlordQ]

> 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.

I'm not sure you know how investigations work. That's how they begin. You nail them on the easy to prove stuff to get them to talk about the rest.

Case not proven

[XXongo]

"There is no such thing as an objective highlight."

The article makes a bold assertion that WikiTribune is not objective, but fails to support the assertion with evidence.

The quote here is an input assumption: the writer starts out with the assumption that any highlights can't be objective, and from that assumption decides that therefore the WikiTribune must be biased.

That's probably true. But the article doesn't make the case.

Re:Case not proven

[Archangel Michael]

I'm of the opinion that people who claim to be "unbiased" are not really all the unbiased. Personally, I would accept bias in news if it was up front about it.

Of course, if you don't see your own bias (because, you've told the lie that you're unbiased so many times), you'll simply reject any notion that you are biased.

There is no such thing as unbiased news. Even the most evenly written piece has its bias where it was placed in relation to other material; Front page news on Pg 14 below the fold. Which is why everyone SHOULD be getting their news from as many sources as possible, to avoid their own echo chamber.

Re:Case not proven

[PeeAitchPee]

Thing is, it's not an impossibly high standard, 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. It's certainly been amplified by the Internet and the 24 hour news cycle. People are tired of this shit, and when the media fails in a huge way -- the prediction of Hillary's coronation with absolute certainty is a perfect example -- they erode the little trust people have left in them. While you choose to blame the doubters, some might say that the news orgs have brought this all on themselves, for decades.

Re:Case not proven

[AmiMoJo]

There used to be a solution to this problem. News outlets would post factual information and then a separate opinion piece offering interesting views, often multiple opposing ones.

What we have now are a few purely factual outlets like the BBC and NHK, and a large number of purely opinion outlets. Notice how the purely factual ones are the ones that are somewhat insulated from commercial considerations.

So reading as many sources as possible alone is not enough. What you need are some purely factual ones, plus some of the more serious opinion ones to help burst your bubble.

Re:Case not proven

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC is pretty bad on bias. An article recently had "why does the US have such an opioid problem" and there number one reason according to them was that we don't have UHC. Of course the number two user of opioids is Canada, who uses about 80% of what the US does, and of course the fact that they do have UHC yet still have an opioid problem was conveniently omitted. That is classical political bias right there.

Born to be biased

[PopeRatzo]

Transparent bias is always better than lip-service to some mythical notion that journalism is supposed to be totally objective.

There is no such thing as unbiased news, and news organizations that attempt to portray themselves as such should be most suspect ("Fair and Balanced!")

Truth is always biased.

Re:Already sunk

[Actually, I do RTFA]

CNN alone gets over 6 million hits for fake news on google. To put this in comparison one of the few notable right wing sites, Breitbart has fewer than 700,000. Even with partisan politics in play that is a huge disparity.

Alternatively, CNN is having a lot of people pushing the story that it is fake news, in the same way a lot of people pushing the story that there is a war on Christmas. Brietbart has not many people pushing the story that it is fake news, in the same way not many people are pushing the story that was a war on Nazis.

In case you missed the metaphor, a lot of people online bitching about something is not a good indicator that it is real, and in some cases implies quite the opposite.