Jimmy Wales' WikiTribune is Already Biased (theoutline.com) 164
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.
Asperbergers (Score:1, Flamebait)
Geez. Aspie much?
Case not proven (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Case not proven (Score:5, Informative)
It's a fairly standard attack used on all media. Set an impossibly high standard and berate them for not meeting it.
People with half a brain look for a more detailed criticism than "humans are involved, so it must be biased" and "they made one mistake, therefore everything they ever did or said is fake news". The goal is to prime people to accept alternative facts.
Re:Case not proven (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm of the opinion that people who claim to be "unbiased" are not really all the unbiased. Personally, I would accept bias in news if it was up front about it.
Of course, if you don't see your own bias (because, you've told the lie that you're unbiased so many times), you'll simply reject any notion that you are biased.
There is no such thing as unbiased news. Even the most evenly written piece has its bias where it was placed in relation to other material; Front page news on Pg 14 below the fold. Which is why everyone SHOULD be getting their news from as many sources as possible, to avoid their own echo chamber.
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So if the layout were performed by random coin flips, by your logic, it would still be biased? By this standard, scaling a photograph from large to medium also commits an act of bias. But then, if a summary is not discernibly different than what it summarizes, it's not a summary, is it?
Without compression, comprehension a mile wide and an inch deep is all you have left.
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If the layout only uses articles that are slanted then it doesn't matter that you use random coin flips. The photographer decides on the focus of the shot and the photo editor decides how much of it to use based on the layout. This process is inherently biased.
Re:Case not proven (Score:5, Interesting)
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... [pinimg.com]
It all depends on the narrative you're trying to portray.
Re:Case not proven (Score:5, Insightful)
There used to be a solution to this problem. News outlets would post factual information and then a separate opinion piece offering interesting views, often multiple opposing ones.
What we have now are a few purely factual outlets like the BBC and NHK, and a large number of purely opinion outlets. Notice how the purely factual ones are the ones that are somewhat insulated from commercial considerations.
So reading as many sources as possible alone is not enough. What you need are some purely factual ones, plus some of the more serious opinion ones to help burst your bubble.
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The BBC is pretty bad on bias. An article recently had "why does the US have such an opioid problem" and there number one reason according to them was that we don't have UHC. Of course the number two user of opioids is Canada, who uses about 80% of what the US does, and of course the fact that they do have UHC yet still have an opioid problem was conveniently omitted. That is classical political bias right there.
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At the end of the day, BBC writers and editors are mostly British, and writing first and foremost for a British audience. They are instinctively going to highlight things that are different from the British system in whatever they write about.
Yes that's bias, of a sort. But it's a sort of bias that every writer everywhere has. The mere fact that you choose to read your news in English, rather than the native language of whatever country you're reading about, automatically exposes you to quite a high level o
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The point, fucktard, is that instead of getting your news second hand (from a reporter) you're getting it third hand because it passed through a translator as well. Plus you won't be able to check original sources.
Re: Case not proven (Score:1)
Umm what? It is entirely possible that the number one problem accounts for the difference in usage. Did they specifically state that a lack of UHC was the one and only factor? You sound like someone who simply doesn't support UHC and will find "facts" where they don't exist i.e biased.
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Did they specifically state that a lack of UHC was the one and only factor?
It isn't a factor at all, which is the point of pointing to Canada with its UHC having almost as bad Opiate problem as the US which has no UHC, which s/he pointed out, which you conveniently ignored. Which is confirmed by your accusation of "You sound like someone who simply doesn't support UHC" comment. THAT is your bias showing.
How about looking at Portugal for how to deal with drug addiction? Why is that never really an option? They have UHC but they don't treat drug addiction like a crime, but rather li
Case proven, really (Score:2)
Here is the real BBC censoring the word "Allah" when covering a terror attack. [youtube.com]
Here is CNN "staging" a protest after the London attacks. [youtube.com]
Damn right they're biased.
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Re:Case not proven (Score:5, Informative)
30+ years ago, news organizations mostly stuck with *objectively reporting the news* rather than subtly leaving out certain parts of the story again and again and again to advance a chosen agenda, or constantly running rabid "opinion" pieces bordering on batshit-crazy levels of outrage.
See Yellow Journalism [wikipedia.org] to understand that's not true at all. In particular, William Randolph Hearst is widely credited with helping to start a war to sell papers [wikipedia.org].
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30+ years ago, news organizations mostly stuck with *objectively reporting the news* rather than subtly leaving out certain parts of the story again and again and again to advance a chosen agenda, or constantly running rabid "opinion" pieces bordering on batshit-crazy levels of outrage.
See Yellow Journalism [wikipedia.org] to understand that's not true at all. In particular, William Randolph Hearst is widely credited with helping to start a war to sell papers [wikipedia.org].
I feel there WAS a golden age of journalism where total objectivity was a prized goal, but the time period is far more narrow than people assume. IE, it was never a "journalism used to be great, and just recently it fell off the rails," journalism was as bad 100 years ago as it was today.
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30+ years ago the newspapers were just as bad, worse even as they hadn't been reigned in by the scandals of recent years. Going back 100 years the media of the day was busy demonizing Jewish immigrants at the behest of their owners.
I'm not very familiar with US TV from before then, but in the UK you could certainly argue that TV news was much more serious and reliable 30+ years ago, for the reasons you mention and also because there was just far less competition forcing them to use clickbait. But even then
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"30+ years ago, news organizations mostly stuck with *objectively reporting the news"
Somehow this ignores the Reagan era. For my childhood and adulthood, spanning more than 40+ years now, all I recall of newspapers is the perfunctory 'objective' reporting mixed in with opinion, bias, and slant. Most major metropolitan newspapers were not merely legendary for their activism, they were unapologetic and celebrated for it.
At least in the US. My memories of this are clear back to 1971, when my American History t
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Citation needed. Reporting that she was nominally ahead in polls with a 3% margin of error is not "absolute certainty" in any statistician's book, and your failure to understand polling statistics is your own problem.
Are you actually that naive? (Score:2)
Yes, with the advent of Fox news and Rupert Murdoch buying up all the local stations th
Meta Ignorance (Score:1)
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 jus
Only looked certain (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 yourse
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To be clear I'm not tolerating or excusing poor journalism, I'm saying that people who like to alternative facts do so by making people think that all news media are unreliable all the time, and so random blog posts by "ordinary people" and alt-news outlets are just as worthy of their attention.
They don't even need to ask people to trust the fake news, just being exposed to it regularly is enough.
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The only answer is to abandon the notion of gatekeepers and seek diverse sources yourself.
But then to get any "truth" about what's happening in Syria or Somalia or North Korea I would have to visit there myself, since anyone reporting from or about there would also have some sort of bias.
Personally, I'd rather believe a BBC foreign correspondent than Joe Blogger from the front line on Twitter.
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The decision to highlight one article over another is subjective.
Even if an algorithm is making the decision.
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The decision could be objective, even if you subjectively disagree.
- An article about how the most recent inauguration crowd was the "biggest ever".
- An article about how there was an inauguration and some people attended.
The first is objectively wrong, the 2nd is subjectively boring.
News without bias is too much. (Score:2)
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
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Nothing being talked about on how they're trying to fix anything.
Because, Anoymous Coward, there's nothing to "talk about".
They're not trying to fix anything. They're not trying to deliver healthcare to the American people or fix the tax code. They're not trying to make Americans safer via sensible foreign policy. They're not attempting to boost the American economy or improve education or pretty much anything.
When they actually attempt to fix something with via sound sensible policy, I guarant
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"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.
CNN? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:CNN? (Score:4, Funny)
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You lost the election fair and square, snowflake.
We all lost the election. All Americans. All freedom-loving individuals.
In the end, even the Donald lost: He was far better off before he stepped into a real spotlight.
You obviously don't understand any of this today, but awareness is something that takes time.
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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.
Re:CNN? (Score:5, Informative)
Which person are you talking about?
Paul Manifort was Trump's campaign manager.
George Papadopoulos was Trump's foreign policy advisor.
Rick Gates is a long-time business partner of Manifort for about 10 years. He worked as an aide to Manifort on the campaign.
All have Russian government connections. Papdopoulos pled guilty to lying to the FBI about those connections.
Manifort has had to register as a foreign agent of the Russian government.
As much as Trump, the Russian government and Trump's supporters scorn the investigation,
this is a serious scandal.
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Which person are you talking about?
Most of them (the people he hired). Hell, even he doesn't like or trust half of them, which is why he's fired and trash-talked so many of them.
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The Mueller investigation is no longer a search for Russian collusion with Trump in the 2016 race. It is now a much more far-reaching inquiry into corrupt lobbying practices all across Washington DC, the so-called "swamp". An investigation that is very likely to ensnare figures close to Hillary Clinton.
In press accounts, Mueller's investigation is still framed as a hunt for collusion between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the government of Russia, but that description is mostly bogus. The inve
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The chairman of one major presidential campaign colluded with a brother of the *other* major presidential campaign to enrich themselves by secretly advancing the interests of a foreign adversary. That happened. That's "the swamp" everyone is saying needs to be drained.
So we're not getting "drain the swamp" after all. We elected a primary collaborator with The Swamp. Fantastic.
Re: CNN? (Score:3)
Re:CNN? (Score:4, Informative)
Crying about the Trump indictments doesn't make them less than real, sorry snowflake.
Uh, there is no Trump indictment.
There was an indictment of some people who worked on Trump's campaign-- most notably his former campaign manager. But the indictment was for stuff that they did before that-- 2008 to 2014, to be specific.
You need to start reading an unbiased news source. Try this one: http://www.politifact.com/trut... [politifact.com]
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True, but the current Pivot is to insinuate that the charges against Manafort and Papadopoulos are intended to get them in a custody so the investigators can wring the inevitably damning evidence from them.
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> There was an indictment of some people who worked on Trump's campaign-- most notably his former campaign manager. But the indictment was for stuff that they did before that-- 2008 to 2014, to be specific.
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.
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Using torture?
No, threats of jail time usually suffice.
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What doesn't exist is not real. (Score:2)
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.
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There was an indictment of some people who worked on Trump's campaign-- most notably his former campaign manager. But the indictment was for stuff that they did before that-- 2008 to 2014, to be specific.
You need to start reading an unbiased news source. Try this one: http://www.politifact.com/trut... [politifact.com]
I followed the link you posted and found this (which is unedited):
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I seriously use The Onion as a news source. It's practically my primary news source, so much so that I tried signing up for the print edition only to find they'd canceled it two months prior.
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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).
This is the problem with a 24-hour news channel. They don't want people to tune in, get the news, and tune out. They want people to tune in and watch for HOURS. To do that they need hours of content, content that has to be different so people don't just see the same thing for hours. Journalism, including investigative journalism, gets expensive, so they fill time with opinion. It doesn't cost a lot to have some guy give his opinion on the news, or have several people sitting around on couches or around a ta
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Now, get off my lawn
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I found out over the weekend that CNN top people have all worked with Fusion GPS top people.
Da.
CNN has been pumping the fake news from Fusion GPS for over a year now and not once mentioned they have close ties/work with Fusion GPS.
Da.
They are literally working with a company that makes up fake stuff, reporting on it as real, and not disclosing that they know its fake and work with the fake company.
Da.
It would be like Clinton complaining Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election, while she was paying $9 million for information from Russia about Trump. Oh wait, that ACTUALLY happened.
Da.
Yep, there is collusion with Russia to affect the election
Da.
BTW - your Russian is pretty good.
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I'm not sure what news sources you use, but they don't seem to be serving you very well.
Already...Still In Business? (Score:2)
The dog bites man version would have been "WikiTribune is Already Closed". I'm just surprised we're still talking about it now.
Re: Already...Still In Business? (Score:2)
Holy Eyebleed Batman! (Score:2)
Lying with facts is a well-known art (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Opinion != bias. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Opinion != bias. (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
We donâ(TM)t need objectivity - we need suppo (Score:2)
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 slo
Re:We don't need objectivity - we need evidence (Score:2)
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.
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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 [sqspcdn.com], by Morley Winograd, Director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government.
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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 c
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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
Born to be biased (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Its not that "news" can't be unbiased. Its that a news reporting organization can't be unbiased.
The first reason it is impossible to be unbiased, even if only the facts are reported, is due to how the stories are presented.
E.x. Article giving the facts of an abuse against a woman by a man is placed on the front page while abuse against a man by a woman is placed on the back page.
Or due to lack of resources a story goes unreported.
These little things create bias. Someone has to decide what gets reported an
Well duh (Score:2)
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.
jimmy and catalan's wikipedia (Score:3)
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Hi! I actually have no idea why you think that. I had to search in my emails to even find out who "Goma" is.
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As Stephen Colbert once said (Score:3)
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It's a dig on 'media bias' (Score:2)
the dull wits of Rube Sneergasm (Score:2)
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 th
So all highlights are biased (Score:2)
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.
It's fine (Score:2)
It's fine. Any news aggregator that filters Fox and Breitbart by default is ok by me.
All news is biased, and that's good (Score:2)
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 ma
Easy solution (Score:1)
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 perspecti
Re:Already sunk (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
The public disagrees with you, which is reflected in their ratings. CNN's ratings have been in a downward spiral for quite some time now.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/S... [wsj.com]
http://www.dailywire.com/news/... [dailywire.com]
http://press.foxnews.com/2017/... [foxnews.com]
Re: (Score:1)
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.