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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.
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).
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Rachel Maddow, is that you?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
>> WikiTribune is Already Biased
The dog bites man version would have been "WikiTribune is Already Closed". I'm just surprised we're still talking about it now.
The Outline's web page design is vile. .
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"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.
I just checked Wikitribune and the Manafort inditement story is already pushed down to the 11th spot on the page (way "below the fold" in newspaper speak). I guess the Trumpbots have been hard at work pushing unrelated stories up.
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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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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.
Wales is asking for it if he believes he can create some source of ultimate objective truth. Weâ(TM)ve already got a very elaborate system established for this purpose, and itâ(TM)s called science. It doesnâ(TM)t work via lofty ideals of objectivity, though - it works by âoeevidence or STFUâ. Skepticism, argument, and some adversarial critique are key to culling out the B.S. and locating whatever humble truth remains. Itâ(TM)s a system for distilling usable meaning out of a sloppy input of amalgamated subjective human experience.
So to the extent that Wales tries to reach âoetruthâ by following the same principles of empiricism, skepticism, and open discourse, he might do something useful. More likely, though, this will be yet another news aggregator, but this time run by unaware idealists.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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Sweet jesus... that's the last time I ever try posting from the mobile site. Intended formatting below:
Wales is asking for it if he believes he can create some source of ultimate objective truth. We've already got a very elaborate system established for this purpose, and it's called science. It doesn't work via lofty ideals of objectivity, though - it works by "evidence or STFU". Skepticism, argument, and some adversarial critique are key to culling out the B.S. and locating whatever humble truth remains. It's a system for distilling usable meaning out of a sloppy input of amalgamated subjective human experience.
So to the extent that Wales tries to reach "truth" by following the same principles of empiricism, skepticism, and open discourse, he might do something useful. More likely, though, this will be yet another news aggregator, but this time run by unaware idealists.
Anything that has any human input is going to be subjective (aka "biased") in nature. The only goal that's achievable is to make it less biased than others.
it is well known that jimbo is really good friends with Goma, one of the catalan wiki promoters, which accounts for the hardly neutral treatment of catalonia political crisis on the tribune.
No matter how, you will have to decide to call people freedom fighters and when they are rebels. Or even more subtle, wanting independency or wanting their independency or even not against it.
Also we now know that there is a difference between facts and opinion. Should opinions be seen as news? When I have one, probably not, when POTUS has one, probably yes. So where is the line?
So 100% objective and neutral news is not possible. That does not mean you should not try to achieve it, as long as you understand that it will be abused by people and it will give nutjobs a platform where people might start to think that because they are heard, there must be some truth in it.
If you have 100 scientist say that it is proven and 1 idiot says it is not, you can not give both the same amount of place/time to put out their ideas. OTOH it could well be that that 1 person was right, so you can't shut him up either.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
reality has a well known liberal bias.
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There are about 7 billion people in the world, everyone doing something today. The news cannot cover what everyone did or said, so it needs to trim it, to things out of the ordinary. Now this reporting out of the ordinary normally will create a Liberal Bias.
As the most basic aspect of Liberal vs Conservative (in a world view, not just American) is that Liberals want to change problems they see, Conservatives want to keep things as they are. So the Liberals are generally doing things that create news.
Lets say there is a petition to change stop signs from Red to Yellow. Because Yellow is a more visible color, and most people are not yellow color blind, plus a bunch of other stuff. If the news is covering this, they will explain how this group has all these points, while the conservative group will say, lets not confuse people, as yellow signs have historically meant keep an eye out, not necessary do something.
So the Liberal stance will get paragraphs of coverage while the conservative stance will get a few sentences. Unfortunately Conservative news, isn't as much on what the conservatives are doing, but how bad the liberals are. So you will get headline Liberals wants to change stop signs causing the death of thousands. Because not all changes are a good. But still conservative news relies on the Liberals for its action. As News is explaining something out of the ordinary.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"completely unbiased new reporting" is something that is not actually possible."
Of course it is. But it would be uninteresting to most and occupy very little attention.
Oh, and not much volume. Facts are dense compared to opinion.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Too often the standard of evidence in matters of bias boils down to this:
A circus promises to reform itself, to eliminate the grotesques: the fat woman, the thin man, the midget, the geek, etc.
Rube Sneergasm promptly visits reformed circus, and later reports back to townies that Barnum is smoking crack: quite obviously, the lion tamer is pudgy and diabetic, one of the acrobats still has a distinctively anorexic pallor, and there was an incriminating pile of rough-hewn chicken heads found in a heap behind the mess tent.
Less keenly observed: the nearby kitchen axe hasn't been properly sharpened since the geek was handed his walking papers.
And he supports this claim by providing highlights. Thus proving himself biased, resulting in his being sucked into the Recursion Vortex forever.
Move along, people, there's nothing to see here.
You are defending CNN, who has fired 4 journalists this year alone for lying.
You said it: CNN fires journalists for lying.
Humans will misbehave, but a well-run organization will straighten them out or kick them out.
Compare this to Fox News, which hardly fires anyone for any reason, let alone lying, in spite of being the most inaccurate news source in America.
It's fine. Any news aggregator that filters Fox and Breitbart by default is ok by me.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
A long rant because I feel like it. Got some time to kill. :)
People really need to get this idea of an allegedly "unbiased news source" out of their head. The news comes from journalists, reporters on the ground with cameras, recording devices and laptops/pencils. They are certainly less biased than "Joe the Plumber", as can be seen from the fact that professional journalists can write for many different journals, but they are certainly only humans with their own thoughts and beliefs. They occasionally make mistakes and they are also biased. There is nothing wrong with that. Likewise, there is only a limited number of journalists (correspondents, freelancers, press agency employees, etc.) and so they, together with the press agencies, need to select where they go and what to investigate. There also just limited space for news / news consumers are easily tired, and so a further editorial selection is required by the editor in chief and his team. This is all quite normal and there is no problem with that either.
Everybody I've ever heard from who works in journalism has said that news are biased in one way or another. In fact, I remember very well that this was considered a trivial truism when I grew up in the 80s. I think we even learned and discussed that in school. And it was never considered a problem, because intelligent people do not automatically believe everything they read and critical readers can investigate different sources when needed. It was and has always been a problem with the tabloid press (like Bild or Daily Mail). But everybody knows that. Not even idiots take everything they read in tabloids seriously.
So where does the sudden hysteria about lack of objectivity in mass media come from? Two reasons. The first reason is that in the US a fringe right-wing movement has become much stronger than in the past due to Trump's election and other factors. Radical left and radical right have always criticized mass media, so now in the US there is a stronger right-wing critique on them. This critique is, of course, ideological. Radical ideologies fare better with disinformation, because they tend to not have reality on their side. (That's in a sense why they are "radical"- otherwise they'd be more on the "obvious" side.)
Second reason: There are strong forces with an interest in advertisement and disinformation for clickbait, viral marketing, political shilling, and in some cases even information warfare. These came to power with the Internet and do for the most part not even employ journalists, they just copy and paste "stories", including fake news and rumors, from other sources for mildly annoying to very nefarious purposes. There is no big conspiracy, the motives vary from getting more ad clicks to pushing some ideological agendas. All of these sites have in common, however, that it is in their interest to paint traditional media in a bad light to get more clicks and readers.
That's why so many people are suddenly so keen to point out how "biased" mass media are, as if there were any less biased "fringe media". Everybody knows that all media are biased and every news is selected by someone according to trends. It has always been that way, since the first newspaper was started. Another problem is that apparently some people have lost the ability to distinguish between news and editorial/comments entirely and also often loose track of who said what. But I'll stop here. (This is all quite obvious, so pardon me if you got bored.)
ideas and let the group find the right answer through their combined experiences.
Given how far astray critical thinking has often taken us, maybe it’s time to embrace the Millennial Generation’s approach and see if it leads to even better results than the preferred methods of older generations.
New generation critical thinking, by Morley Winograd, Director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government.
30 years ago was 1987. If you honestly believe the media wasn't biased you're nuts. When I was a kid there were nonstop stories about scary, incredibly well armed gangs with the sub-text being that they were mostly black. This was the origin of 'tough on crime' and our private prison system. And don't get me started on the media's coverage of drugs. Go back further and you can find them gearing us up for war after war.
Yes, with the advent of Fox news and Rupert Murdoch buying up all the local stations the propaganda's gotten a lot worse (CNN isn't exactly helping, sure they're a little left on social issues but their war and economy coverage is pro-corporate 24/7).
Just because things have gotten so bad that you can notice it without being a news hound doesn't mean you weren't being manipulated 30 years ago. It just means they were better at it back then.
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It just means they were better at it back then.
I disagree. The mainstream news was much more heavy-handed back then because they could be. Back then there was barely any widespread media criticism so people were much less aware that there were any other perspectives. If you weren't an expert in a topic, you had no idea when the reporting might be misleading so reporters could be sloppy and barely anyone would notice. Kind of like how watching 'hackers' in the movies make all the computer experts groan with disbelief, but the general population just nods along because they simply don't know any better.
Now its easy to find media criticism because internet. The problem is that the same ignorance that made people uncritically trusting of one-sided reporting in the past now makes it hard for regular people to differentiate high-quality criticism from bullshit, agenda-driving complaining.
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.
That may be how they work. But the post I was replying to said "Trump indictments", not "indictments of co-conspirators that might someday get people to talk and lead to others, arguably including Trump."
There are no Trump indictments. Saying "Crying about the Trump indictments doesn't make them less than real," -- well, in fact they're not real. They don't exist.
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.
Include multiple perspectives on every issue. Don't remove them. Leave them there but make it clear that there is controversy on some things. Let people say why they think something is or is not true.
A lot of the debate that happens under the skin of a wikipedia page is interesting and should be more prominently displayed.
Here someone might say that would make an "article" very long because instead of just telling one story about an issue it would basically tell all of them from a lot of different perspectives. You'd also get conspiracy theorists and trolls flooding the thing to say X or Y about everything.
But so what? Its a website so space isn't an issue. And you just organize it so that things are sorted by whether or not a given fact or element of a story is controversial. So basic information like "the names of people"... probably not controversial in most cases. So that would be shared data between all the scenarios. Then you'd have bits of information that were poorly sourced or inferred conclusions based on known information... that people felt were controversial.
Maybe have a summary of the article based on the most prominent/popular interpretation of the information and then alternative interpretations based on different filtering metrics... such as... excluding everyone's opinions accept a given factions.
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Skepticism is now discouraged in education. Consensus is the new thing.
I know a lot of climate change skeptics like to criticize consensus, but consensus isn't antithetical to skepticism, and is actually born out of thorough skepticism. It also has its place in science. In fact, I'd say the "group approach" is very compatible with scientific thinking. Specifically, we have to acknowledge that science can't happen in a vacuum - look at the decline of science in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union for your evidence - the limitations imposed on collaboration with the international communities and the end of free speech really dampened the ability of either nation's scientists to make real progress. If you want to make sure that none of your ideas are based on fact, just throw scientists in jail or work camps any time their theories contradict your ideology.
To work properly, scientists have to attend conferences and talk to one another and criticize each other's ideas. Consensus sometimes emerges out of this process, which is a good thing - we shouldn't still have people debating the virtue of the Copernican vs. the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. That said, in a classically liberal, pro-science society, people are still welcome to express disagreement, although unless your argument is highly novel it has probably already been considered and rejected many times over by the professionals, and it will be received accordingly.
I didn't sat anything about climate change
Here is the real BBC censoring the word "Allah" when covering a terror attack.
Here is CNN "staging" a protest after the London attacks.
Damn right they're biased.
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the right wing have been complaining about media bias for decades even as the media favors virtually all of their economic policies (tax cuts, the wars which make no mistake are economic, deregulation, unfettered free trade and cheap work visas, etc, etc). Meanwhile those same have tanked the economy for the working class (though the actual elites, the ones making all the money, are doing better than ever). Yeah, the media is a bit left on social issues (gay rights and abortion mostly) but everything else they've long since been far right. It's not surprising, look who owns them. You don't talk bad about your boss if you want to stay employed...
Colbert is a court jester, calling out the king for his hypocrisy. The quote encapsulates all that. He gets away with it because he's a court jester. No one who matters really takes him too seriously.
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I didn't sat anything about climate change
Nope, but I don't see anybody except climate change skeptics having a problem with consensus.
My point is just this: it's true that decision by consensus isn't science, although it's important to acknowledge that the creation of models good enough to gain consensus is to some extent the entire goal of science. If people couldn't have generally agreed on Newton, then they never would have progressed to Maxwell or Einstein. However, science is built to make achieving that goal as hard as possible. You kick the crap out of an idea, try everything you can think of to prove it wrong, and have all the world's top experts in the field criticize it mercilessly. If, after all that, it is accepted by a majority of those experts, then it is hopefully pretty decent.
I'm not sure what news sources you use, but they don't seem to be serving you very well.