Comment by sejje
9 days ago
I don't know even one news source I "trust." I expect them to push an agenda.
I also don't think they care even a bit. They're pushing agendas, and not hiding it; rather, flaunting it.
9 days ago
I don't know even one news source I "trust." I expect them to push an agenda.
I also don't think they care even a bit. They're pushing agendas, and not hiding it; rather, flaunting it.
People need to abandon the notion of "trust" being a single axes between trustworthy to untrustworthy.
Every source has it's biases, you should try to be aware of them and handle information accordingly.
I prefer when the bias is "we don't run xyz story" vs "we run a slanted version of xyz story."
They're both a bias, of course, but one is more palatable.
"everyone is stupid but me" is a bit too prevalent in the tech industry
You are doing it to the parent comment right now.
Why not interpret it to mean something like “no news organization has biases that are fully aligned with my best interests”
There's no kind way to interpret "They're pushing agendas, and not hiding it; rather, flaunting it." that isn't deeply hateful of news orgs a whole. Additionally this talk is almost always followed by "I therefore just allow myself to passively hear news through others (which have no biases)" or "I only get my news from hitlers-strongest-soldiers.com" or similar "unbiased" news sources (or maybe just "youtube"/"tiktok"). Deeply conspiratorial thinking and anti-intellectual to think literally everyone is out to get you. I don't think I'm smarter than everyone (which is why I rely on other people to give me the news), but I am at least smarter than this person.
Not everyone surely. But some people
Persinally i think people harp on news bias too much.
I think the real problem is that they often dont put events in context, which leads people to misunderstand them. They report the what not the why, but most events don't just happen one day, they are shaped by years or even decades of historical context. If you just understand the literal event without the background context, i dont think you are really informed.
Is it more likely that no one is speaking the truth, or, more likely, to you, the truth looks like an agenda?
What I'm talking about is that the news tries to tell you what to think. You can read headlines on Google News about the same story, and see the bias of the publication in the headline pretty often.
Instead of reporting just the facts, they include opinions, inflammatory language, etc.
Reuters writes in a relatively neutral tone, as an example. Fox News doesn't, and CNN doesn't, as examples of the opposite.
If you don't notice, I doubt you're reading the news. It's part of the offering. Fox does it on purpose, not accidentally.
Everyone has an agenda. The question is whether they are also reporting facts.
This is the particular thing I care about. If I can count on their facts, I can mostly subtract their agenda.
See: https://app.adfontesmedia.com/chart/interactive
The problem comes in when I can't count on the "facts" being reported.
What is wrong with reading other people opinions?
Newspapers in my country always were blogs before the internet existed. Its why they are still around and doing quite well- they don't just bring news.
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I consider almost all news to be entertainment unless I need its perspective to make a decision (which is almost never). It is a lot safer to remain uninformed on a subject as it settles than to constantly attempt to be informed.
Information bias is unfortunately one of the sicknesses of our age, and it is one of the cultural ills that flows from tech outward. Information is only pertinent in its capacity to inform action, otherwise it is noise. To adapt a Beck-ism: You aren't gonna need it.