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

Re:Opinion != bias.

[bluefoxlucid]

You can't have an opinion on most of the news.

People have tried to claim that some of my statements on economic policies are opinions. That doesn't work. Either I'm right, factually, because my assessment of the facts is correct and my collection of facts is complete enough to reach a correct conclusion; or I'm wrong, factually, because my assessment of the facts is incorrect or my collection of facts is critically incomplete.

Minimum wage increases cause job loss. We increase minimum wage frequently because Malthusian growth (a corrected form--primarily using job availability as a proxy for means, such that changes in unemployment lead to reactive changes in the labor force size) suggests exactly what we see: low unemployment causes an increase in labor force size, by population and participation. Low wages increase employment while also increasing poverty at the bottom; then, when you true up minimum wage ten years later, you make a bunch of people poorer and other people less-poor.

This is why you see minimum wage plans with slow phase-in during growth periods: the loss reaction has a short delay, while the established growth counters the job loss. Thus the minimum wage bumps in quarters and half-dollars every several months only slow growth, rather than creating unemployment (that is: they reduce employment relative to no minimum wage increase, but employment is growing).

Facts. The kinds of facts economists use to suggest updating the minimum wage each year to follow inflation, and to phase in a general minimum wage increase over a few years instead of all at once.

There's another implication: a high minimum wage generally decreases employment, thus carry capacity (using the jobs model of Malthusian growth to which I briefly alluded). That means pinning a minimum wage to, say, GDP-per-capita rather than inflation causes a decrease in poverty at the lower end, as well as a decrease in economic growth (thus GDP grows more-slowly).

Whether or not slowing population growth is a generally-good or generally-bad cause is an opinion, from a philosophical standpoint. There are facts to argue; however, population control--the little cousin of eugenics--is a scary, authoritarian concept, the kind of thing for which we criticize China from a philosophical standpoint, and so we may argue over whether or not this is the sort of thing Government inherently should do, factual nature of any overpopulation notwithstanding.

You can reach the opinion that such population control efforts are distasteful but factually necessary, or that they're no cause for concern and people's moral imperatives are silly. You could conclude that the indirect, economic method is fine, while the direct method of limiting birth rates is government restriction of freedom and the type of terrifying dystopian authoritarianism against which we must fight as a free nation. You can say all kinds of airy, fluffy things about it--and it's only an opinion.

Claiming an analysis of facts as an opinion is a common informal fallacy. You'll see it come up when you discuss the scientific basis of addiction and willpower as an exhaustable resource, and people tell you they don't believe in all that and that drug addicts are making a choice--even though, scientifically, it's physically-impossible for drug addicts to take action to end their addiction if the parts of their brain required to override the natural impulse to escape discomfort is exhausted, as it has run low on ATP and cannot continue burning fuel to produce output without causing extreme brain damage (which, of course, your brain won't do). The science-deniers often claim differing opinion due to their poor basis of facts from which to argue.