
Biased News Media or Biased Readers? An Experiment on Trust - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/upshot/biased-news-media-or-biased-readers-an-experiment-on-trust.html
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speeder
Sadly they only measured bias in the sense of how much people is biased in
relation to the brands, they didn't found out a way to measure articles
quality and then cross with the data they collected from readers.

Example: in my country the most popular news outlet has lots and lots of
haters, obviously there will be bias against their brand, but not undeserved,
they admitted themselves openly to have manipulated news for political reasons
in the past, caused some mass panic and ruined people lives with literal fake
news, got convicted more than once for libel, and their reporters and anchors
often express their political views openly on air...

~~~
merpnderp
Is that like CNN threatening to doxx some random nobody because he made a
political gif? That they're so biased, they're actively participating in the
political game?

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Context: The POTUS broadcasted the gif. Afterward, CNN claimed to have found
the original creator, who CNN had kept anonymous but reserved the right to de-
anonymize them if circumstances warranted.

~~~
protomyth
It was the conditions of _reserved the right to de-anonymize them if
circumstances warranted_ that made CNN look bad.

~~~
Retric
I find CNN's behavior completely reasonable.

Basically, they investigated and then showed _gasp_ discretion. Yet, people
somehow think they did something wrong?

The issue is the implication, that if the guy had not apologized they would
_then_ do something. Instead of only doing something if the guy started
sending death threats or something.

~~~
394549
> Basically, they investigated and then showed gasp discretion. Yet, people
> somehow think they did something wrong?

The problem is it seems they used their journalistic position to blackmail
someone into a particular course of action, and they are using the threat of
future blackmail/doxxing to enforce continued compliance from that person.

IMHO, it's journalists' job to report newsworthy facts to the public. It's
unethical for them to either hide or reveal facts based on other agendas,
which include such small agendas as getting a particular reddit jerk to be a
bit more circumspect.

> The issue is the implication, that if the guy had not apologized they would
> then do something. Instead of only doing something if the guy started
> sending death threats or something.

Was the creator of the gif actually sending death threats and the like, or is
that something you made up?

~~~
Retric
> The problem is it seems they used their journalistic position to blackmail
> someone

Now, if CNN actually threatened the guy that's not ok. But, this comes down to
what you assumed _might_ have happened, not something that we know actually
happened. Another possibility is they called the guy up for a story and he was
instantly apologetic on his own initiative.

> Was the creator of the gif actually..

I said "if the guy started" as I assumed he had not done so.

I am simply saying treating such things as _potentially_ serous signs of
another _possible_ newsroom shooting in the making is understandable. Not
because of his actions are unreasonable, rather because of crazy people also
doing similar things in the past. Organizations of this size are already
paying people to do this stuff, the guy happened to hit the radar enough that
he was next on the list.

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chriskanan
What incentive do journalists have to not be biased? They are people and have
opinions. Even if the opinion isn't explicitly stated, they often frame the
story to inject opinions by withholding contextual information. I see this a
lot in topics I'm an expert in. Stories are often biased to maximize
rage/excitement to elicit more user engagement.

I think the tools for measuring engagement have led to optimizing toward
misleading click bait, and I would say that just about all of America's large
media outlets are prone to this (to varying degrees).

~~~
creaghpatr
Even if the journalist is unbiased, the editor is usually the one who chooses
the headline and whether or not to run certain stories.

~~~
repolfx
Yes, I've seen that problem before when working with journalists on stories.
The journalist themselves understood the issue was somewhat grey, and the
editor mangled what they produced to be much more biased.

I don't think it's purely about financial incentives to be honest. I suspect
that many journalists view themselves as primarily social activists rather
than chroniclers, and being able to directly influence society in a major way
is effectively seen as part of the compensation package.

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vertline3
In another thread, a person replying to a Google blog said software is about
trust, because a person can't read millions of lines of source.

Once trust is broken it's hard to get back. So maybe news is also about trust.
Hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

~~~
dnomad
> because a person can't read millions of lines of source.

But a person _can_ read millions of lines of source code. It's perfectly
possible given enough time and with a solid team you can do it in 90 days.

Trust is not the problem. Nobody actually _needs_ trust any more. It's a 19th
century concept. Modern markets select away inefficient and unpredictable
collaboration protocols like trust and replaces them with violence,
transparency, and pervasive surveillance.

The problem is the lack of verifiability. The vast majority of what comes out
of the American media is unverifiable nonsense. Take out all the anonymous
sources, leaked but undisclosed emails, "he said, she said", baseless
speculation and the ever popular "reporting of reporting" (where media entity
A reports on X simply because media entity B reports X -- even though X is
pure bullshit) and what you'd be left with is the market data and live events.

TFA is probably right that most Americans are hopelessly biased. But this may
be the natural result of a media diet that is so completely lacking in basic
verifiable information. Any conman knows if you ask people to believe X
without evidence they will only believe it if _they_ want to believe it (and
they will believe it much more strongly than they would if you had presented
evidence). Do this enough times and you can train people to believe anything,
again without a shred of evidence. The end result is a nation of media
consumers trained from a very young age to accept information without evidence
so long as that information confirms their own ideology.

~~~
repolfx
A lot of information is verifiable, it's just people don't do it. You're right
that it's often because they want to believe.

Read any story that involves Russia and spend a few minutes doing fact
checking. Or check back after a week. You'll find the story is very likely to
be factually wrong and might have been retracted.

You don't need anything more than Google to reveal that the stories are false,
sometimes not even that - just reading the story carefully and watching for
internal contradictions is sufficient. But almost everyone I meet believes
these stories completely.

For some reason lots of people desperately want to believe that Russia is the
bogeyman. They not only won't use simple and easy tools available to them,
they actually get upset when other people do it.

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dooglius
Unlike in the orchestra study they mention, the people doing the ratings have
no way to differentiate between biased and neutral news articles, since they
won't be familiar with the underlying facts involved. The only thing that can
really be judged by reading an article is how eloquently it was written. It
seems pretty reasonable to use brand perception (in lieu of anything else) to
judge bias, particularly in political articles.

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douglaswlance
The news media attempt at gaslighting readers to trust their authority.

We need a decentralized information verification system. The old centralized
methods are not working at our current scale.

~~~
sbradford26
Maybe I am just being cynical but I feel like a decentralized information
verification system would be a prime target for abuse. Would a majority
opinion just become indisputable truth?

I am basing my idea of this off of a blockchain based approach but I am not
sure if that is what you are referencing.

~~~
2038AD
>Would a majority opinion just become indisputable truth?

Even worse -- a decentralized information verification system will endorse the
opinions of the few while claiming to be majority-rule.

~~~
douglaswlance
If that were the case, then it wouldn't be embraced by the ever more
intelligent public.

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gambler
_> The lesson from this and other studies of discrimination is that
withholding irrelevant information can enhance judgment._

Most modern news are irrelevant information. You can take almost any article
and reduce it to a single paragraph without loosing informative, factual
content. So why are we pushed to read the rest?

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grigjd3
So my take away from this is not that readers are biased or that news is
biased, but that we can't give up our own responsibility in identifying the
truth. I am aware that news outlets are biased, but knowing that does not mean
I can't read articles in those sources and learn from them. It's incumbent on
me to put something I read into a larger context, to make educated guesses as
to an article's correctness, and to think critically about what is being
stated. Otherwise, I will make choices far more prone to some personal bias.

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pjc50
I worry if this focus on "bias" is distracting us from the more important
question of reliability. Is an article that gives equal time to pro-vaccine
and anti-vaccine arguments "unbiased"?

This is much harder to measure because it involves looking at news outlets
retrospectively over time. A newspaper that accurately reports what bad
sources have said may not be "biased" but can make the public significantly
more misinformed.

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diego_moita
When bloggers, youtubers and social media accuse the media of being biased it
looks like a bush doctor accusing the whole medical establishment of
malpractice.

Sure, the system is not perfect. But the alternatives are far worse.

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mtgx
Biased media:

[https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-
storie...](https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-
bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/)

~~~
ComputerGuru
WaPo has become horribly biased in the past four years, it is like a high-
quality, long-form Huffington Post. They always have an agenda to push and
they don’t try to hide it.

~~~
pessimizer
That's pining for the good old days that never were; the WaPo were terrible
before Bezos, and constantly printed editorial as news. All Bezos did was add
the horrible linkbait headlines, and the barely-indirect talking up and
defense of his own financial and personal interests.

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chrisco255
Oh, it's the readers that are at fault...not the media themselves. This is
like blaming the human condition without realizing said condition also applies
to you.

We are all biased. All of us. We are all tribal neanderthals with a thin sense
of bias, period. As quickly as old biases are torn down, humans will erect new
biases and causes to rally around.

It will always be a battle of in-group vs. out-group from now to the end of
time. Not saying bias itself isn't worth fighting. Maybe we can minimize bias.

In my experience, the only way to minimize bias, is to discuss, debate, and
digest a wide variety of views.

My main problem with discourse today is that the very mechanism for breaking
down bias (debate and discussion) has broken down. You can't debate things
anymore without being labelled something atrocious.

~~~
baby
> My main problem with discourse today

> You can't debate things anymore

I can't stop hearing this "it used not to be like this". Does this erroneous
argument has a name?

~~~
dx87
I don't think the argument is erroneous. From talking to people who grew up
before the Web became mainstream, they said that since your social circle was
typically neighbors and colleagues, there was much more incentive to be civil
because you were going to see those same people almost every day. Once the Web
became popular with the mainstream, people started to form ideological bubbles
because now you could pick your social circle, causing people to grow
accustomed to everyone agreeing with them. Once in their echo chamber, they
don't need to defend any of their beliefs, causing them to lose the ability to
have civil disagreements with people they disagree with, and they don't need
to, because they can just stay in their bubble and surround themselves with
thousands of people who all think the same thing.

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gibsonf1
I remember how objective the New York Times was in the early 90s - they would
follow the facts wherever they went and in depth - it was a great paper then.

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candiodari
Tldr: it is now considered discrimination to think that the NYTimes is biased.
Clearly there can be no other reason ...

But ... [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-
well...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/opinion/facts-have-a-well-known-
liberal-bias.html)

THE ONLY REASON I SAID !!!!!!

(When asked what the clearest sign of extreme bias in someone is, the above
statement is my answer. If you're thinking of saying "facts have X bias" or
"reality is biased" ... You've gone off the deep end)

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PedroBatista
Both, but the media is more "agile" on their morals.

The more I see the more I think many if not most reporters/journalists/media
people are sociopaths. definitely not better than politicians.

~~~
malvosenior
I think we can thank Twitter for exposing this. When you can go to a
journalist's twitter page and see their actual thoughts directly (opposed to
heavily edited and curated through their media property), you can get a better
sense of who they are.

What I found is that there's an enormous amount of group think and yes,
sociopathic tendencies among journalists. They also tend to tweet _a lot_ ,
like 30-40 times a day.

Ironically the archetypal example of this is Sarah Jeong and the New York
Times. That they would publish this article about bias in their readership,
while being obviously biased themselves pretty much sums up that whole
sociopath thing...

~~~
SolaceQuantum
_That they would publish this article about bias in their readership, while
being obviously biased themselves pretty much sums up that whole sociopath
thing..._

By the best interpretation of this statement, it is highly confused as to what
sociopathy is, and may be harmful in its belief that normal human cognitive
biases are signs of mentally ill behavior. It makes total sense that people
would have inconsistent metrics applied to themselves vs to others. It's
normal human psychology.

~~~
malvosenior
I believe that the NYT _knows_ they're biased and actively tries to conceal
that (with articles such as this one). They also try to manipulate their
readership and general discourse.

So I'd say it goes beyond just regular, every day human psychology and into
sociopathy or whatever the organizational equivalent is.

------
romed
In which we learn again that listeners of Rush Limbaugh are, still, the least-
informed people on earth. Also apparently Rush Limbaugh still exists. Look: if
someone spends decades ranting about how you can't trust anything anyone says
unless it's him, that tells you a lot.

