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

Reporting the news is biased???

[bit trollent]

Uh, the Manafort indictment, and Trump / Russia collusion guilty plea is the biggest story since the great recession.

This seems to me like sour grapes from a republican who doesn't want to have to see articles about news he doesn't like.

I'm sorry that Donald Trump committed treason, colluding with Russia's attack on America. I'm sorry for your sake that he has been caught, but glad for America that we are finally starting the long process of bringing this heinous traitor and criminal to justice.

News is news. Donald Trump committed treason, and you can't suppress the news about his co-conspirators being arrested and testifying about his campaign's collusion just because you consider objective reality to be biased.

Re:CNN?

[jedidiah]

Someone Trump hired turned out to be a bad man. This man is bad because of things that don't really relate to his work for Trump. However, the "justice system" will try to black mail him over these crimes in an attempt to gain evidence on others.

It's classic "McCarthy/Law & Order" nonsense.

It's the sort of thing that kills your faith in government.