The issue is, it’s not really possible to do that in many if not most cases. For example, suppose you’re a political reporter, and a politician makes a claim that happens to be objectively false. Do you merely report that the politician made that claim, or do you report that the politician made that claim and that it is false, or merely report that the politician made a false claim without repeating it verbatim? All of those things are only reporting verifiable facts in this scenario, but they all give different impressions as to the character of that politician.
The obvious answer one might take is to go with the second option, and say that one should just report all facts available to you and relevant to an issue, because choosing what truths to say and what not to say still presents a biased picture even if every statement you make is a true one. But this is not a solution, because you simply cannot and will not have room to say every true statement about something, and you have to decide which things are relevant and irrelevant and to what degree, and your personal biases will influence these decisions regardless of how much you try to avoid that, because there’s not a way to objectively measure relevance.
Further, you do not actually know what is objectively true. You might say that a politicians statement is verifiably correct or incorrectly, because you believe that to be the case- and be wrong about that. There’s a greater likelihood that you’ll scrutinize something said by someone you disagree with, and so you’ll unintentionally portray your favored candidate in a better light, just because you don’t have time to verify every single sentence (and for that matter, since you’re a reporter and not actually someone collecting and analyzing the raw data, you won’t generally be equipped to verify things yourself so much as ask someone who you believe is reliable, and who therefore probably agrees with you and shares your biases), and you’re more likely to check if something is true if you already suspect that it isn’t.
Perhaps then, to be safe, you might only report that the politician said “x”, and not comment on if it is true. Beyond the obvious issue of helping to spread lies even if you don’t technically yourself say that they are truths, just that the person that said them did so, you still don’t have room or time to repeat every single thing that politician says. If you report on the more absurd statements of one politician and the more reasonable statements of another (which it may be hard not to do subconsciously, because absurd positions that align with your own won’t seem as absurd to you and therefore not as important to inform people of), you once again create a biased narrative out of nothing but true statements.
Finally, even if you avoid all this, you still introduce bias by when and where you say things. Stories run on the front page are more likely to get seen and read. TV broadcasts made when people are awake and at home are more likely to be watched. YouTube videos that appeal to the site’s algorithm are more likely to be seen, etc.
It is simply impossible to run an actually unbiased new source. You cannot say the whole truth, because you neither know it all nor have room for it all nor have the capacity to give it all equal attention. And you cannot say nothing but the truth, assuming you say anything at all that is, because your knowledge and sources are not infallible. The best you can do is state your biases up front, to the best of your ability, so that people know what kind of perspective your reporting comes from.
I understand and appreciate your point. That is why I used the term verifiable facts. If you can verify that claim X is false, (such as Trump’s claim of a rigged election, which have repeatedly been verified to be false) then by all means, report it as such. That is not taking a side. That’s reporting. At least, that’s how I see it.
How often are facts truly verifiable though in practice, especially for a reporter, rather than just deciding that a certain set of people are honest and know what they are doing and asking them for their thoughts and evidence, which is really just taking the side of those people? Like, consider science reporting (because its probably a best case scenario, where claims made are supposed to be statements of objective truth about what was observed that can be physically verified, as opposed to being full of emotions and values). If youre a reporter reporting on something some scientists at CERN or whatever are telling you they’ve found, its not like you as a reporter have access to the equipment they use, or the know how to use it or understand what the data it generates implies. You pretty much just have to take their word for it. You could choose to go ask some scientists in the same field at a different lab who have been replicating the experiments about it, but then youre still just trusting those scientists too, rather than truly “verifying” the original scientists claims in a way that doesnt require taking somebody’s side on the issue by trusting their word or the authenticity of the evidence that they present. Now, with the scientists this is usually good enough, they dont usually have a ton of incentive to lie, and when they do, their colleagues dont have a ton of incentive to help them with it, but with politics, theres a lot of incentive to lie, a lot of incentive to support people on the same side as you, and a lot of incentive to try to undermine those on the opposite side even when the first side wasnt lying, so that trust is a bit more tenuous.
This isnt to say that I think we should take Trump’s blatant lying about the election seriously or anything, but its not like reporters reporting on it can prove for sure that there cant have been some kind of vast all encompassing conspiracy against him, including the legal system and therefore any evidence brought up in the various court cases on the matter, they can just point to those myriad of court cases and conclude that the odds that it was all some kind of conspiracy must be so low that the idea is laughable and not worth considering. Which isnt technically actually verifying that it is false, so much as pointing out that it makes far less sense to take Trump’s side on that than the side claiming he’s a liar such as to be safe in taking the side of the latter.
You can, however, interpret what the politician says, descern the parts that are meaningful. This shouldn’t need to be quantified, as we do this automatically. Diving into this is to dive into neuroscience and biological imperative. Insisting a road map into how we mentally triage information is philosophy and, more importantly, not the point. It is arguing in bad faith. We can all tell what points someone is stressing or leaning on even in rambling meandering conversation. We all know statements said in passing or flippantly - they might suggest something more, but that remains to be seen if it’s indeed acted upon, so we make a mental note and back burner it. When there’s multiple instances of dubiousness then it’s story worthy. Otherwise it’s focus on the main topics at hand, regardless of if you agree with them. This isn’t rocket surgery, it just requires attentiveness.
A journalist can, and should, report the information and fact check to the best of their ability. The news team he hands it in to should be fact checking and helping ensure it’s accuracy. It’s not a one person show and, like most things, when you do it for a while you actually can get good at it. And rather fast.
Above all has to be an almost religious adherence to the truth. Fuck objective truth, it doesn’t exist. Neither does altruism. Neither does objectivism. You’re taking esoteric thought that only hold any value when used as parameters. Perfect isn’t attainable but that doesn’t mean we still making art.
You’re argument is just smart enough to rationalize yourself out of action. But life is action. The thoughts in your head aren’t real, nor are your plans. If they are, where are they? I care about what happens in reality, and if needed I can work at underlying motive or reasonings, but I don’t need those to understand what has manifested into being.
Hate breeds hate. Tolerating hate is just allowing a tumor to grow. It will, as tumors do, eventually metastisize and go malignant. If we know that, and we allow that, then the blame is on us. See; Tiger Eating People’s Faces Party. We must be intolerant of intolerance else it spread and overwhelm us all. If that dialectic is to much for you to hold at the same time then you’re not ready for the conversation. There will be many many times in life where there is no good choice but you still have to choose (refusing to choose is still a choice). As unpleasant as it is, there is behaviour that can not be tolerated by society for the health and survival of society. It’s a duty we have to uphold and if you can’t, thats fine, just step back and let those who can, do. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
A religious adherence to truth necessitates admitting when you learn you’re wrong. There’s nothing wrong with being wrong. There is everything wrong with learning you’re wrong and you not accepting that. The entire basis of rationality, and society, are built upon the fundamental, a priori, notion. There’s no hyperbole in that. It is the bedrock of civilization.
I do not think you entirely understood what I was trying to convey, be it from misunderstanding on your part or poor phrasing on my part I am unsure, because my argument isnt for non-action nor is it for tolerance of hate. My last statement there was a statement that one doing reporting should be open about what one’s biases are, which is advocating for taking a specific action, not for doing nothing. The topic of hate didnt even come up in my response really, but that is partially because, I view it as a case where bias is desirable (in the sense that intolerance is in my view morally undesirable, and so portraying it in a bad light in the hopes of limiting its spread in society is a good thing. That in itself represents a bias, one against intolerant views, which is fine as bias is not a synonym for “bad” nor one for “incorrect”, merely for favoring a side in something. If the side one is favoring is actually correct in that thing, then presenting that argument in a way that favors that side is actually more accurate than presenting the argument entirely neutrally, despite being biased). All my response there was really saying is that given fallibility of our ability to determine what is true, it is preferable for organizations seeking to inform others to state what side they are taking, rather than attempt not to have a side and inevitably fail in doing so while still presenting themselves to others with the false sense of impartial objective accuracy that would come from believing that claim.
Well put. Thank you for the clarity. I appreciate your effort towards elucidation.
I agree there has to be a neutral as possible position if only to teach. Finding that balance has, for the past 4 decades at least, been an impossibility, due to politics, forcing us to graduate students with absolute no sense of recent history or the current world they are being thrust into. I harbored anger over this at least til the end of my 20s, and I wasn’t the typical student. I have read the newspaper front to back daily since the start of my junior year (or since I was 16). I had read a dozen Chomsky books and Professor Zinn on my own in high school. I knew exactly how the educational system had failed us. I was so upset by the seemingly entire collection fo adults in the country failing to agree on what actually transpired in recent history that I started reading philosophy for an example of what great humans could be capable of, because there were clearly none in DC during the Clinton presidency.
I still contend that there is a large amount of fact that is discernible, that journalists used to rigorously parse thru. It’s not for my knowledge that I’m concerned, it’s the normalization of news-cycle theatre that concerns me. Case in point. Trumps assassination attempt. The fuck his ear got hit. Anyone who has ever shot an AR-15 will tell you that he wouldn’t have an ear left, even if it was just a graze, let alone be walking around with a normally “healed” ear less than two weeks later. It was staged and it cost that fireman his life and somehow everyone just moves on believing what they want. All for a photo op.
No 80 year old on this planet is going to heal a bruise that fast, anywhere on their body.
Regardless. I think we understand each other. Cheers.
It’s easy you listen to your corporate boss and lie in your articles to sway the public to defend your heinous neoliberal political views so that you can maintain the status quo and continue to have access to the corporate politicians you bribe with your lobbyists to do your bosses bidding, and you shut your mouth and don’t ask any follow up questions
The issue is, it’s not really possible to do that in many if not most cases. For example, suppose you’re a political reporter, and a politician makes a claim that happens to be objectively false. Do you merely report that the politician made that claim, or do you report that the politician made that claim and that it is false, or merely report that the politician made a false claim without repeating it verbatim? All of those things are only reporting verifiable facts in this scenario, but they all give different impressions as to the character of that politician.
The obvious answer one might take is to go with the second option, and say that one should just report all facts available to you and relevant to an issue, because choosing what truths to say and what not to say still presents a biased picture even if every statement you make is a true one. But this is not a solution, because you simply cannot and will not have room to say every true statement about something, and you have to decide which things are relevant and irrelevant and to what degree, and your personal biases will influence these decisions regardless of how much you try to avoid that, because there’s not a way to objectively measure relevance.
Further, you do not actually know what is objectively true. You might say that a politicians statement is verifiably correct or incorrectly, because you believe that to be the case- and be wrong about that. There’s a greater likelihood that you’ll scrutinize something said by someone you disagree with, and so you’ll unintentionally portray your favored candidate in a better light, just because you don’t have time to verify every single sentence (and for that matter, since you’re a reporter and not actually someone collecting and analyzing the raw data, you won’t generally be equipped to verify things yourself so much as ask someone who you believe is reliable, and who therefore probably agrees with you and shares your biases), and you’re more likely to check if something is true if you already suspect that it isn’t.
Perhaps then, to be safe, you might only report that the politician said “x”, and not comment on if it is true. Beyond the obvious issue of helping to spread lies even if you don’t technically yourself say that they are truths, just that the person that said them did so, you still don’t have room or time to repeat every single thing that politician says. If you report on the more absurd statements of one politician and the more reasonable statements of another (which it may be hard not to do subconsciously, because absurd positions that align with your own won’t seem as absurd to you and therefore not as important to inform people of), you once again create a biased narrative out of nothing but true statements.
Finally, even if you avoid all this, you still introduce bias by when and where you say things. Stories run on the front page are more likely to get seen and read. TV broadcasts made when people are awake and at home are more likely to be watched. YouTube videos that appeal to the site’s algorithm are more likely to be seen, etc.
It is simply impossible to run an actually unbiased new source. You cannot say the whole truth, because you neither know it all nor have room for it all nor have the capacity to give it all equal attention. And you cannot say nothing but the truth, assuming you say anything at all that is, because your knowledge and sources are not infallible. The best you can do is state your biases up front, to the best of your ability, so that people know what kind of perspective your reporting comes from.
I understand and appreciate your point. That is why I used the term verifiable facts. If you can verify that claim X is false, (such as Trump’s claim of a rigged election, which have repeatedly been verified to be false) then by all means, report it as such. That is not taking a side. That’s reporting. At least, that’s how I see it.
Allow me to throw this wrench in the works:
Facts without context mean very little, and there will always be some bias in deciding what context is presented.
How often are facts truly verifiable though in practice, especially for a reporter, rather than just deciding that a certain set of people are honest and know what they are doing and asking them for their thoughts and evidence, which is really just taking the side of those people? Like, consider science reporting (because its probably a best case scenario, where claims made are supposed to be statements of objective truth about what was observed that can be physically verified, as opposed to being full of emotions and values). If youre a reporter reporting on something some scientists at CERN or whatever are telling you they’ve found, its not like you as a reporter have access to the equipment they use, or the know how to use it or understand what the data it generates implies. You pretty much just have to take their word for it. You could choose to go ask some scientists in the same field at a different lab who have been replicating the experiments about it, but then youre still just trusting those scientists too, rather than truly “verifying” the original scientists claims in a way that doesnt require taking somebody’s side on the issue by trusting their word or the authenticity of the evidence that they present. Now, with the scientists this is usually good enough, they dont usually have a ton of incentive to lie, and when they do, their colleagues dont have a ton of incentive to help them with it, but with politics, theres a lot of incentive to lie, a lot of incentive to support people on the same side as you, and a lot of incentive to try to undermine those on the opposite side even when the first side wasnt lying, so that trust is a bit more tenuous.
This isnt to say that I think we should take Trump’s blatant lying about the election seriously or anything, but its not like reporters reporting on it can prove for sure that there cant have been some kind of vast all encompassing conspiracy against him, including the legal system and therefore any evidence brought up in the various court cases on the matter, they can just point to those myriad of court cases and conclude that the odds that it was all some kind of conspiracy must be so low that the idea is laughable and not worth considering. Which isnt technically actually verifying that it is false, so much as pointing out that it makes far less sense to take Trump’s side on that than the side claiming he’s a liar such as to be safe in taking the side of the latter.
You can, however, interpret what the politician says, descern the parts that are meaningful. This shouldn’t need to be quantified, as we do this automatically. Diving into this is to dive into neuroscience and biological imperative. Insisting a road map into how we mentally triage information is philosophy and, more importantly, not the point. It is arguing in bad faith. We can all tell what points someone is stressing or leaning on even in rambling meandering conversation. We all know statements said in passing or flippantly - they might suggest something more, but that remains to be seen if it’s indeed acted upon, so we make a mental note and back burner it. When there’s multiple instances of dubiousness then it’s story worthy. Otherwise it’s focus on the main topics at hand, regardless of if you agree with them. This isn’t rocket surgery, it just requires attentiveness.
A journalist can, and should, report the information and fact check to the best of their ability. The news team he hands it in to should be fact checking and helping ensure it’s accuracy. It’s not a one person show and, like most things, when you do it for a while you actually can get good at it. And rather fast.
Above all has to be an almost religious adherence to the truth. Fuck objective truth, it doesn’t exist. Neither does altruism. Neither does objectivism. You’re taking esoteric thought that only hold any value when used as parameters. Perfect isn’t attainable but that doesn’t mean we still making art.
You’re argument is just smart enough to rationalize yourself out of action. But life is action. The thoughts in your head aren’t real, nor are your plans. If they are, where are they? I care about what happens in reality, and if needed I can work at underlying motive or reasonings, but I don’t need those to understand what has manifested into being.
Hate breeds hate. Tolerating hate is just allowing a tumor to grow. It will, as tumors do, eventually metastisize and go malignant. If we know that, and we allow that, then the blame is on us. See; Tiger Eating People’s Faces Party. We must be intolerant of intolerance else it spread and overwhelm us all. If that dialectic is to much for you to hold at the same time then you’re not ready for the conversation. There will be many many times in life where there is no good choice but you still have to choose (refusing to choose is still a choice). As unpleasant as it is, there is behaviour that can not be tolerated by society for the health and survival of society. It’s a duty we have to uphold and if you can’t, thats fine, just step back and let those who can, do. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
A religious adherence to truth necessitates admitting when you learn you’re wrong. There’s nothing wrong with being wrong. There is everything wrong with learning you’re wrong and you not accepting that. The entire basis of rationality, and society, are built upon the fundamental, a priori, notion. There’s no hyperbole in that. It is the bedrock of civilization.
I do not think you entirely understood what I was trying to convey, be it from misunderstanding on your part or poor phrasing on my part I am unsure, because my argument isnt for non-action nor is it for tolerance of hate. My last statement there was a statement that one doing reporting should be open about what one’s biases are, which is advocating for taking a specific action, not for doing nothing. The topic of hate didnt even come up in my response really, but that is partially because, I view it as a case where bias is desirable (in the sense that intolerance is in my view morally undesirable, and so portraying it in a bad light in the hopes of limiting its spread in society is a good thing. That in itself represents a bias, one against intolerant views, which is fine as bias is not a synonym for “bad” nor one for “incorrect”, merely for favoring a side in something. If the side one is favoring is actually correct in that thing, then presenting that argument in a way that favors that side is actually more accurate than presenting the argument entirely neutrally, despite being biased). All my response there was really saying is that given fallibility of our ability to determine what is true, it is preferable for organizations seeking to inform others to state what side they are taking, rather than attempt not to have a side and inevitably fail in doing so while still presenting themselves to others with the false sense of impartial objective accuracy that would come from believing that claim.
Well put. Thank you for the clarity. I appreciate your effort towards elucidation.
I agree there has to be a neutral as possible position if only to teach. Finding that balance has, for the past 4 decades at least, been an impossibility, due to politics, forcing us to graduate students with absolute no sense of recent history or the current world they are being thrust into. I harbored anger over this at least til the end of my 20s, and I wasn’t the typical student. I have read the newspaper front to back daily since the start of my junior year (or since I was 16). I had read a dozen Chomsky books and Professor Zinn on my own in high school. I knew exactly how the educational system had failed us. I was so upset by the seemingly entire collection fo adults in the country failing to agree on what actually transpired in recent history that I started reading philosophy for an example of what great humans could be capable of, because there were clearly none in DC during the Clinton presidency.
I still contend that there is a large amount of fact that is discernible, that journalists used to rigorously parse thru. It’s not for my knowledge that I’m concerned, it’s the normalization of news-cycle theatre that concerns me. Case in point. Trumps assassination attempt. The fuck his ear got hit. Anyone who has ever shot an AR-15 will tell you that he wouldn’t have an ear left, even if it was just a graze, let alone be walking around with a normally “healed” ear less than two weeks later. It was staged and it cost that fireman his life and somehow everyone just moves on believing what they want. All for a photo op.
No 80 year old on this planet is going to heal a bruise that fast, anywhere on their body.
Regardless. I think we understand each other. Cheers.
It’s easy you listen to your corporate boss and lie in your articles to sway the public to defend your heinous neoliberal political views so that you can maintain the status quo and continue to have access to the corporate politicians you bribe with your lobbyists to do your bosses bidding, and you shut your mouth and don’t ask any follow up questions