Canada’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia, is owned by an American hedge fund headed up by a wealthy donor to Donald Trump.
Canada’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia, is owned by an American hedge fund headed up by a wealthy donor to Donald Trump.
Most people don’t read the news at all, they certainly won’t take the time to read a bio on every single article they’re reading.
Really the problem is media literacy and everyone becoming so meta minded. If a politician says something, they said it, that’s a fact. The constant need to tell people how they should think about everything is where things have gone wrong. What’s the strategy behind the thing the politician said? What impact will this have on the voters? Blah blah blah.
Putting a meta layer on top of the news where people will analyze the bias of the person analyzing the strategy behind what a person said isn’t getting us closer to the truth, it’s building more layers of meta bullshit on top of the other meta bullshit.
Facts aren’t biased. It’s all the crap they package with the facts that has the bias.
Print the quote. Show the speech. Focus on the facts and let people think for themselves about their opinions on those facts.
At least the effort diminishes over time. There are a lot fewer mainstream journalists than articles.
I would like to see more non-profit effort into making this information plainer and more accessible, in a way that has wide reach yet doesn’t depend on media cooperation. Heavily promoted robust (and free) browser extensions, for example, that can parse out publication and author and will automatically show terse bios, or autogenerate (or select from a comprehensive bio) author/publication background information relevant to the specific article. The signal-to-noise ratio has to be super high so a tiny amount of additional information is highly informative and also pervasive.
Tools like Ground News or the 3rd-party publication rating systems don’t go nearly far enough and don’t have enough reach nor reduce user effort enough.
Facts in and of themselves aren’t biased. Bias is introduced when you consider which facts get broadcast, and which don’t. The context in which facts are stated also adds bias. I think that bias is fundamentally inherent to humanity.
You’re probably right about people ignoring bias markers, but I was thinking more “incorporating your bias consciously, rather than subconsciously, throughout the article” instead of a bio or blurb at the top.
As soon as you tell someone that there is bias in an article they’ll likely ignore any facts in that article.
Really a major issue we have today is people falling down conspiracy rabbit holes. Are the likes of Alex Jones going to be telling people their bias honestly? So if we have all of the responsible journalists telling people their bias while those that peddle conspiracy theories don’t, doesn’t that just make it easier for those that peddle conspiracies? “This article debunking what I’m saying has a liberal bias, of course liberals are going to claim that I’m lying!”