Maybe it’s exacerbated by the polarization of this election, or the CBS thing, or whatever… but it seems impossible to just get the news nowadays.
Every source seems to have a political slant to the news, which you can usually tell in a few minutes. If you take the same basic news from different sources, there’s a consistent leaning in the stories that are selected, or which ones are given prominence, or the choice of facts they contain, or the way they’re presented.
And, what’s more, it doesn’t seem like there’s any bones being made about it. Everyone who’s in the know is perfectly aware of which source has which leaning, and it’s an accepted part of of modern journalism.
So, is there any news source out there that’s interested in just reporting the news? That can instruct its reporters and editors to put their personal views aside (except, of course, in editorials)? Is there still such a gold standard of unbiased reporting?
In my opinion it is best not to depend on any one source.
I watched C-Span for Convention coverage. That allowed unfiltered coverage without commentary. I also watch Senate hearings on C-Span so that I can form moderately informed opinions for myself. I watch programs which present commentary from both sides – Crossfire, for example. Since I have a Liberal bias in my thinking and I am aware of it, I try to pay attention to sources that I consider to be intelligently Conservative. Finally, I read sources that people I trust consider to be generally reliable – The BBC and The Guardian.
Firstly, political news, to my knowedge has always reflected the political biases of the sources (Hearst newspapers, anyone?), but political news is not all the news that’s imprtant. What inherent bias, would one say, can be detected in the various news organizations’ reporting of natural disasters, accidents and crime, which make up the bulk of straight news reporting?
Secondly, don’t get your news from TV; the majority of what passes for reporting on television is hopelessly shallow and thus nearly useless (IMO), and the TV news networks don’t seem to care very much about maintaining a separation between straight reporting and Op-Ed.
Finally, if one wants to minimize single-source bias, try the direct feeds from AP, AFP and Reuters, or just make sure you’re getting your information from several news sources with varying degrees of known bias to them.
Nowhere. You’ve got to take in multiple sources and attempt to distill factual information from polemical bullshit. Not easy. Probably impossible.
The easiest bet is may be to pick one major American outlet, and two or three foreign outlets, maybe like the BBC, Xinhua, and Al Jazeera. Compare, contrast, toss the baloney, and hopefully get a good, multifaceted picture of events.
Of course, the above would be a full-time job, now that I think about it.
Never mind. Ignorance may really be bliss after all.
The only news source that doesn’t have a bias would be something like a 24/7 live-cam of Times Square. To say CBS does not have a liberal bias is as silly as saying that Fox News offers ‘fair and balanced reporting.’
Read newspapers with opposing positions. I regularly read the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. I read The Economist on the weekend.
All newspapers, magazines, broadcast news, blogs, and any other source must be written by a human being. And a human being’s mentality is the sum of their personal experiences and beliefs. So when they’re writing up the presentation of a story, their “views” must come into play in deciding what to write, because that’s the only thing a human being has.
Consider this headline from CNN.com: “Flight diverted after Cat Stevens turns up on watch list.” So we have this new story. An airplane was ordered to make an unscheduled landing because one of the passengers was on the TSA’s watch list of people suspected of having terrorist connections. So when this story gets written up, what should go into it to make it objective and unbiased? What facts about the incident belong in the story and what facts don’t? What background information is relevant enough to be included and what isn’t? Should the media tell us about previous flights that have been diverted based on information that turned out to be erroneous? Present statisitics suggesting that the list has reduced terrorist threats? Tell us what methods are used to classify certain people as being suspected of terrorist connections. These are all opinion questions without a single answer that obviously qualifies as the “unbiased” one.
From a quick check, it seems that AP does not have a direct-view source - they feed only to other news outlets. Articles are searchable on Lexis/Nexis, but presumably only in raw form and only if you know what you’re looking for. Does anyone know of anyplace that just organizes the AP news and makes it available?
Reuters, on the other hand, does have a viewable news page: www.reuters.com. An initial scan looks pretty promising - have to check this out closer.
I always use a combination of Reuters web site, and the google news pages. Google gives me a reasonable cross-section of differently biassed news sources, whilst reuters trys hard to avoid bias and covers most stories reasonably well.
Reuters is regarded, at least by The Wall Street Journal, to have a strong liberal perspective. Understood, the WSJ would regard almost any news source as liberal. Just because it is a news service doesn’t mean it can’t have a political bias.
I’m going to claim, however, that there’s still a difference between *judgement * and bias. Certainly, the author of the article needs to exercise judgement as to what to include in the article. But it should still be possible for the reporter to ask themselves “What do I need to put in this article so that the reader will understand what happened?”
They will need to make decisions about what background information to include, who to quote, etc. But we can talk about how Cat Stevens got on the watchlist, without implying whether he should or should not be on the watchlist.
I would even claim that this same concept applies even to investigative reporting, not just short articles. A reporter might do an expose on the torturous path of how names get on the watchlist, and still leave it up to the reader to form an opinion as to whether it’s necessary to fight terrorism, abuse of power or just misguided bureaucracy.
I think there was a time when this is what journalism would have meant. It’s an ideal that may be hard to reach every time, but that’s why we had journalistic standards, editors to keep reporters in line, etc. Now it seems like the whole idea of reporting this way is lost.
Google news for overall headlines. The Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor for in-depth analysis.
The Washington Post, just to annoy the Moonies.
The Los Angeles Times for local stuff.
The ABC and SBS in Australia are largely publicly funded and free of institutional bias. I trust them for my Australian news and world news, respectively.
You’ll have to connect the dots for me, here. Bias would enter from that, because…
The main difference being that a company needs to make money, I guess this means that the buying public only wants slanted news, and/or that advertisers only want to support slanted news. Neither of these is obvious to me.
If you postulate that the public and advertisers want unbiased news, then the logic works just the opposite. A company would have added incentive to be unbiased, for fear of losing money. Whereas a non-commercial enterprise, unfettered by its dependence on filthy lucre, would be free to pursue a partisan agenda according to the whims of its staff.
So, if I derive your thinking correctly, you’re saying that companies have to pander to an audience that wants biased news, and can’t afford to stick to traditional journalistic ethics?
As a guy sitting in a network news room many days of the week, I have to say that people who think ‘the company’ controls what I put on the air don’t know what they’re talking about. Nobody has ever come down from on high and dictated what story I must or must not include.
No one has ever tried the opposite tactic and been subtle about restricting news either…
There are many news organizations that have political axes to grind. Hell, that’s how the whole damn industry started! But in my experience, in most newsrooms you’ll usually find a plethora of viewpoints on any given issue (along with people who just don’t care about your particular pet subject) that coalesces into a fairly even keel.
And don’t forget that there is a world of difference between news programming and opinion gabfests.
