this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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There's no such thing as unbiased news. News is informed by all kinds of biases at every moment, many of which are completely innocuous and harmless, even good.
For example, most news sources refer to people in stories as men or women, and use gendered pronouns. Gender is a social construct, so recognising it implicitly in an article is a bias. An unbiased news source would refer to everyone as they/them and never present a gender identity as fact. It would always refer to people as people. Well, except for the fact that personhood is a social construct too. And so is humanity. They'd have to call everyone beings or entities. And that's bad. An unbiased news source is bad. The news should have the bias that it presents people's gender identities as facts.
What Ground News presents as unbiased stories are usually center-biased stories, not unbiased stories. And the lie that centrism is unbiased is dangerous. Every story on Ground News is equally biased, because everything is a bias. Their bias rating is a dangerous lie. Because encouraging people to see the most common view as unbiased causes people to go along with whatever view is common, even if it's bad. Even if, for example, the government has been taken over by Nazis. Bias confirmation machines like Ground News are always dangerous, but they're especially dangerous when fascism begins to be normalised, which is the struggle we're currently facing.
they don't write the stories though, so can't control the pronouns. I do appreciate their effort to try make sense of the news with an alignment reading, but I agree with you that it encourages centrism in the long run
Yes, but why aren't they marking all the news sources that implicitly push the idea that gender exists as biased in that way? Why do they ignore certain biases and not others? The answer is that they're conflating bias with controversy. If something is uncontroversial, they're saying it's unbiased. That's bad.
I guess they level a political narrative over that of social narratives. As someone who's not LGBT (but obviously will always vote for the rights of others), it's the political one I care about most to read, and I'm guessing a majority of their readers too.
It's not an LGBT thing. I'm using gender as an example of a thing we can all agree is a social construct so I can make my point about bias without having to get any more controversial with it. But if you really want a political example, here is the same point but more political:
Every news source that refers to the existence of the United States of America is biased. The USA is a social construct, it doesn't have objective existence. And many groups have objected to its existence, as it's a genocidal state illegally occupying stolen land. Any news article which refers to the USA as though it were a thing that exists is implicitly pushing settler colonial narratives. This is a clear bias. Ground news should be labelling any article which refers to the USA as biased.
Anything, if you examine it, is just a social construct. The news sometimes wield these constructs to create false narratives to constrict our views/rights, but more often than not, the news is simply trying to convey a set of events from its perspective using a shared grammar that the majority of its audience will understand.
We cant push the frontier without having a base.
Yeah, now you're starting to get it. Everything is a social construct and all news is biased in favour of certain constructs. What Ground News does in judging some sources as less biased is dangerous nonsense.
Course, antirealists don't believe in a reality, so I'd say they're the only group which is capable of less bias than the human norm. And they're all anarcho communists.
Ok so we can't use ground new because of bias. Where do you suggest we go to get our news then. I agree that there will always be some bias but surely a system that gives you news from so many sources will be less biased than sticking to just one or two sources
Not really. Suppose I show you one article that says vaccines don't cause autism. Now suppose I show you that one article, and 99 articles that say they do cause autism. Which one is giving you a more accurate view of the facts? Obviously, including more lies and misinformation will not reduce the amount of bias.
The point is to show different biases through their source’s own interpretation of facts, not to deliver unbiased news themselves.
Put another way, Ground News is kinda saying “here are some cold days, hot days, and in-between days. This is what we experience.” You’re sitting there saying “they’re liars! Have you forgotten 0 degrees kelvin and the center of the sun?!?”
We haven’t forgotten but it’s not the point. Moreover if they changed their scale to show the modern left is not really left wing at all, then they would not be representing what we’re seeing, and critically, they would not be shareable as a demonstration of bias in news. Because most people would dismiss them as propaganda without really digging in.
Well see that's the problem. They're lying to gain mass appeal. They're calling liberals leftists and participating in the move of the Overton window in America towards fascism. That's bad. You figured out the problem all by yourself, you didn't need me to explain it for you.
I worry that so many calculations for everything would be very tiring quickly. I don't think I could do it.
Then choose to wilfully accept good biases into your life, and don't strive for the imaginary, impossible ideal of "unbiased"