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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).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"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 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.
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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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.
reality has a well known liberal bias.
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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.