Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
News Quality and Perspective
I've been making a habit of watching Newsline on NHK World online for the past few weeks, but I watched a bit of MSNBC on TV recently. It was an actual news program, not an OP ED show, but I was still amazed as to how differently two stations reported on the same news (in this case, the meeting between US and other countries with Iran concerning their nuclear program). I realize that different points of view can create different interpretations of the same events, but it was almost like they were talking about two completely separate meetings.
I thought that, since this forum has a great many participants from around the globe, maybe some of you might have something to add.
I thought that, since this forum has a great many participants from around the globe, maybe some of you might have something to add.
Comments
1) There's no such thing as a 100% neutral perspective.
2) That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, however.
3) MSNBC & Fox do not try. CNN sucks also, though they're more inconsistent about it.
4) Watch something that tries hard to be neutral, because it's better to form your own opinions than to have someone tell you what your opinions are. Things that are awesome: BBC, NPR, Reuters, some people like Al Jazeera, and my dad swears by STRATFOR, but it costs something like $350/year.
News consumers want facts. But they also want explosions. They want sex and scandal and schaddenfreud. They want someone to blame. They want the rollercoaster experience. As long as the facts remain the core of the reporting, making the news more a production is not ethically problematic.
I liken it to the way that many people avoid certain kinds of video games because they're bad at them, not because the game isn't fun or interesting.
You'd think that analyzing enough differing perspectives would yield something close to reality, but sometimes, things get glossed over. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act proved that even the most intelligent out there don't do all the research they need to in order to have a truly informed opinion.
*By change, I mean filter. Given the same information. Two completely logical people with different views can come up with different but still logically sound opinions.
Who cares what the opinion of some journalist is? If you are intelligent, you can separate the factual part from the opinion part. Then you can form, or reform, your opinion based on the facts. It doesn't matter how crazy the opinion of the journalism is if the facts are correct, because you shouldn't be influenced by the opinions of journalists.
How a story is reported will color your opinion of the facts regardless of how smart and savvy you are.
Here's a hint: nobody. Not even skeptics. Not even guys up in the ivory towers of academia. The smartest men on earth. Find me one who will actually change their perspective based on facts.
EDIT: So, basically, until we can increase the rate at which human beings will change perspective based on facts, the bias in reporting information won't matter. The observer is more flawed than the reporter in almost all cases.
However, if you are an intelligent person, like I hope you are, you will see through this bullshit like the bottom of a KFC take-out bag. First, I hope that you will get your news from sources where you read, rather than video or radio sources, since that allows you to carefully and slowly examine all the words in the story. Second, I hope that you will indeed carefully examine each and every word in that story to extract the factual information and ignore the other information.
As is a problem very often on this forum and the rest of the Internet, people use very specific words when communicating. One word, or even one punctuation mark, can completely change the meaning of a sentence. People do not read each and every word with the care required, and they fail to comprehend what is being said. If you read carefully and thoughtfully, it won't matter if the reporter wants you to think that the suspect is guilty or not guilty. It won't matter that they want you to think the union or the company are the good guys in a particular labor dispute. You will read the story carefully, extract only the facts, and make your own decision.
The only problem arises if the source is lying or leaving out critical information. Then even after you extract the facts, you will come to the wrong conclusion.
The berry argument we had at the shore is a great example. We read about "false berries" and assumed that meant that there are berries and not berries. As Nuri later explained to me, and I subsequently read on my own, that is not the case; a "false berry" is in fact a type of berry. Yet, the information we read was completely factually correct.
The problem with this: is that almost nobody actually has the knowledge base to understand what is or is not critical information for every single given topic. This is why we have specialists who communicate with each other; we each know what is or is not missing from a particular piece of knowledge. We didn't have any reason to suspect that a "false berry" was actually still a berry, because none of us were botanists who were familiar with the abnormalities of plant nomenclature.
Some people think that they can have a complete perspective, and I blame widespread access to the web for this misconception. Just because you can read lots of information doesn't mean you have any idea how to actually meaningfully interpret said information.
EDIT: Also, not all wording differences are actually significant. This is another common tactic in spinning information; you use different words that mean the exact same thing as an argument which was previously rejected, and attempt to pass it off as novel.
However, if you know your audience, it is actually quite easy to select only the facts which have consequences for that audience, and present them in a comprehensible and fully correct fashion. For example, take the recent news about Firesheep. Firesheep is not the most complex technology topic out there, but fully understanding how it works is definitely out of reach for almost all people. Despite that complexity, I can, in just a few sentences, provide all of the information a layman needs to know about Firesheep.
If you are using a computer on an untrusted or public network, such as a wireless access point in the park or coffee shop, then other people on that network can spy on you. If you are connected to such a network, and you login to any web site, users can trivially steal your accounts. The only way to protect yourself is to only login to websites while using public networks if the secure lock icon appears in the browser location bar, or if you are using VPN software, like that which employers usually put on their laptops.
See? Good news is not hard, and is definitely possible. It's also incredibly boring and will not make any money. That's why it won't ever exist. One idea I thought of was to make it mandatory for all news to be non-profit. If you want profit, you can't use the word news to describe yourself. It's commercial speech, so it's totally constitutional to make such a regulation, just like we regulate the word juice to only beverages that are actually 100% fruit. That's why Kool-Aid and Hi-C can't call themselves juice.
How do you determine who "needs to know" what information? There are countless consumer watchdog agencies pushing to have all sorts of information reported to the public, including completely irrelevant information that muddles the issue and can potentially lead to people making uneducated decisions.
Controlling the dissemination of information is critical to true understanding, but every time that happens, people get their panties in a twist about it.