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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.
I always had a double filter: everything I said had to be understood-correct by me, and also complete and correctly represented to the expected concerns of the listening party. I never really learned to lie, and instead had explained people's behavior as a pseudo-mathematical equation balancing their wants and needs, and identified that folks are generally tended to blame themselves for bad outcomes if they understand the likelihood going into it.
That is to say: if you bullshit people and they don't like how things turn out, they stop liking you; if you're honest with people, they'll tend to do things even if it's understood it will probably turn out bad for them, and then blame themselves when it turns out bad for them and good for you. In the latter case, they're happy to work with you again.
People fight wars for the simple freedom of choice. I suppose they appreciate being given its full exercise.
What you really need to do is give people a sense that what they're doing is somehow interesting to them. People are happy to take on hardship for things like philosophical ideals--which is exactly what charity is.
It's that "complete and correctly represented to the expectations and concerns of the listening party" bit that's key, though.
You can omit facts. You can omit facts which would raise concern and objection. This is fine so long as you don't omit facts which actually have material effect on the outcome. That someone doesn't understand things well enough to accurately evaluate some omitted facts is immaterial; what matters is that the omitted facts aren't cause for their concern when correctly evaluated.
There are journalists out there who make a pretty good career out of presenting a lot of factual information, organizing it, and giving an interpretation, while omitting other facts. Their interpretation is incorrect or incomplete: they tell people what to think, and so they tell people the truth and paint a lie.
That's the real problem: you can lie to people without speaking any untruth.
Any selection of news will necessarily cultivate certain facts in a certain way, and omit other facts. Just the selection of subject matter creates political bias. The closest you can get to an unbiased news source is to intentionally create an extreme bias: ground everything out to neutral. Take the popular view, the emotion and perspective gaining the most momentum in the media, and pick it apart, factually. Drag it down to the least-concern; cut down all the outrage and the excitement; turn it from the sensational to the mundane.
The underwear bomber? He had PETN. It requires a bulky, compressive detonator to produce an explosion. I can't recall at the moment, but I believe it has low volume and high crack--it will destroy whatever you use it on, thus put a hole in a plane, but won't create a big explosion--although I may be confusing this with semtex. A block of PETN without an impossible-to-hide detonator will create a light show and a spectacular display of incompetence, nothing more.
Getting that thing on the plane was never a concern. It's not exactly dangerous.
In an atmosphere of media panic, these are the facts which strip the bias. This is an extremely-biased analysis; it only modifies the general tone with a counterweight, though. Instead of talking up some opposing point, it counterpoints everything exciting and frightening in the original. It turns the sensational into the mundane.
That is the injection you need to promote a more-rational media: bring people back down to the ground, where they can think. Put them in a place where they can work out whether to reject your conclusions. Cut away the distortion of emotion. Change the subject from what happened to what to do about it, or how very infrequently this happens.
Let the media set the stage by showing what people get excited about; then give them a reason to calm down and think.
Anything else is just putting your views against their views, leaving you free to select what facts to provide and which to leave out of the discussion.
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> It's a fairly standard attack used on all media. Set an impossibly high standard and berate them for not meeting it.
This is a lame excuse for phoning it in or just plain being a party hack. Your kind of tolerant apathetic nonsense is a big part of the problem. You not only tolerate the nonsense, you make excuses for it.
You say "summary", I say a selective presentation of the facts designed to fit a pre-set narrative.
The only answer is to abandon the notion of gatekeepers and seek diverse sources yourself.
You really can't outsource the truth.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Geniune question: is being anti-Trump a biased position? What would he have to do for it to stop being bias, and simply be the reasonable position given the facts?
Should one have to scrape around for some positive story about Trump, to give an artificial semblance of balance?
If I write about Hitler gassing children, should I devote equal space to, say, the notion that he was a vegetarian for animal rights reasons, in an attempt at balance?
Random coin flips, would be "unbiased" politically, yes. However, IMHO the case of putting Page one material on Page 14 is a bias, no matter which way it goes.
Photo Editing can be biased. https://i.pinimg.com/originals...
It all depends on the narrative you're trying to portray.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.