Every news organisation is biased. The Telegraph is right-wing; the Guardian is left-wing; the BBC is anti-Tory and pro-EU; the Times and the Sun are pro-Murdoch. And so on.
Only if you have two sources with equal-and-opposite bias, on a subject they both have a reason to be biased about. If one source is a lot more biased than the other, or if one source has no reason to care about that issue or event, the more-biased source will pull the median away from the truth.
Sorry, if I implied the answer would lie in “exact middle”. It’s not a math problem. Really, though, how controversial is “read several opposing viewpoints to try to determine the truth”?
That’s exactly what people should be doing. As I have posted about 2-3 times a year for the last decade, here and elsewhere;
I went to Berean Baptist Church when I was a child. The Bereans were called out in the bible because they didn’t simply believe everything their teachers told them, but went home to read their scriptures to see if what they were being told was true.
So too I recommend that people do the same now. Don’t simply swallow what your favorite media tells you without any critical thought. Look at other sources to see if what you’re being told is true.
And seriously, if you find, on critical thought and investigation, that your favored sources are lying to you, misinforming you or simply not reporting the same things as all other media, then you know that media is a false teacher, a liar, a fraud, and you should stop reading or listening to them.
And seriously, it’s like this: If your Religion/Media/Politics require you to hate people, you need to find a new Religion/Media/Political Party.
That isn’t what you said, and what you said has a very obvious failure mode: If one of your sources is insanely biased to the point of lying, either by omission or commission, your end result “unbiased” viewpoint will be skewed in that source’s direction.
An example is vaccines: The CDC has one viewpoint on how safe they are (generally, very), whale.to has another viewpoint, and whale.to is completely insane. The CDC’s view is, in short, correct, and trying to “correct” it by moving it closer to the whale.to nonsense is going to make vaccines seem much less safe than they really are.
The underlying problem is that whale.to doesn’t have a viewpoint. It has conspiratorial rambling backed up with flawed logic and debunked “studies” done by people the scientific world considers to be frauds and cranks. The same obtains in the climate change world: All honest, intelligent, knowledgeable people agree that the world is warming, humans are causing it, and that’s a problem, and the side opposed to that doesn’t have a viewpoint, it has political whining and no honest logic or evidence. Same with “ex-gay” “therapy” and people going off about how trans people are just delusional: Thinking those ideas are viewpoints, coequal to the viewpoints supported by logic and evidence, is committing the mistake of making a false equivalence. Mike Pence’s ideas about gay people are wrong, GLAAD’s are right, and trying to triangulate between them just makes someone wrong.
So my advice to you is to be very careful with who and what you consider a viewpoint, and be aware that people do, in fact, lie, and that mixing a lie with the facts results in another lie.
I like this chart. There are others.
I pretty much stick to online NYT, WaPo, and Al Jazeera. NPR in the car. I’m over getting enraged on purpose.
Very, if one of those opposing viewpoints is not left-wing. and you mention it.
You keep conflating “truth” with “facts”. They are 2 different things. The fact is that vaccines save lives. One side may indicate that they are perfectly safe, the other that they cause dire side effects. The truth is in between. Closer to the “safe” side than the “dire side effects” side in this case, but in between none-the-less.
You try to find a single source of unvarnished truth if you’d like, I’m going to stick with multiple sources and critical thinking.
Sorry, I have no idea what you’re saying here.
That the SDMB does not believe one ought to include non-leftwing sources at all.
As Lewis Carroll said
or Henry Ford saying the American public can have any car color they want, as long as it is black. “Opposing viewpoints” are fine, as long as they aren’t too opposing.
Regards,
Shodan
Except we clearly haven’t said any such thing and you’re making that up.
You’re slamming the whole board with a false statement, so let’s make it easy.
Show me where I said any such thing in this thread, since I have posted in it several times.
Wouldn’t your own posts be overwhelming evidence that this can’t be true?
Not unless you consider me a main stream news source.
What right-wing news media would you recommend that people use, to get an opposing view point?
Regards,
Shodan
There’s plenty of good ones in the chart **Ulfreida **linked to.
Just not the ones in the lower right corner.
Translation: “If you don’t take Infowars seriously as a news source, you’re a liberal hypocrite.”
So what would you all consider Drudge to be?
I find their news stories to be on the right wing side but they have links to nearly everyone.
To me, news sources are sort of like history books. History is often written by the victors and often the books authors have an agenda. I’ve recently changed some views on WW2 and the Civil War due to reading some new sites which bring up issues not covered in the regular books.
I’m confused by come of the comments in this thread.
For the record Fox News IS mainstream media, isn’t it? How could it not be?
“The Drudge Report focuses on sensationalized stories with a right wing bias. They have a poor record with fact checkers. (7/19/2016) Updated (4/5/2017)”
“The Drudge Report is a news aggregation website. Run by Matt Drudge with the help of Joseph Curl and Charles Hurt, the site consists mainly of links to stories from the United States and international mainstream media about politics, entertainment, and current events as well as links to many columnists. Its viewpoints are often considered conservative.”
I’d consider that fairly accurate.
And then this;
Matt Drudge is a gay right wing conservative blogger who runs the Drudge Report, a conservative news aggregation and gossip website, and a popular news and opinion source for American conservatives and man-made global warming deniers.
SDMB