this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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Privacy
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Its a bad marketing campaign because it is easily turned into threads like this. Also, I have no idea if USA Today is good or not (I genuinely have never even thought about it).
But it is worth understanding. News outlets need to get funding from somewhere. Some are state funded and I should not need to explain why that introduces biases. Others take massive sponsorship deals from companies and ensure that John Oliver will always have something to talk about. And others run ads to varying degrees of curation.
The last option is subscriptions and those are few and far between.
Its more or less the same thing we saw with ads in general over the 00s. More and more people learned how to block ads so more and more websites needed to add obnoxious flash based ads and insane uses of javascript and so forth to get any impressions. And fewer and fewer "good" companies wanted to advertise to adblock heavy audiences which led to more and more trojans and so forth. Which leads to more and more ad blockers and...
In the case of news media? We mostly see this manifest as less investigative journalism and more listicles and "clickbait" articles because those at least get the facebook crowd to click.
So it is very much worth looking in to more permissive blocklists and even permitlists. Block tracking cookies because fuck that shit. But permit sites that you "trust" to have reasonable ads and look in to finer grain blocklists that still allow the actual ads to be displayed, even if they aren't the ones based on Amazon figuring out you have a foot fetish.
I agree that state sponsored media has pitfalls but I never understood this appeal to “unbiased” media. It doesn’t exist because bias can’t be removed from humans.
I always ask 1 question and ask for 1 example here:
When did WWII start? If things are objectively true and we expect historical works/statements to lack bias then this should be pretty simple.
Do you have an example of an objective or unbiased media outlet? A writer? A single article?
This isn’t a dig at you. I just think this is a very broad social issue. Objectivity is a myth. We should recognize biases and account the best we can but “just the facts” reporting just doesn’t exist and never has. People demanding objectivity are often using it as a cudgel in defense of their argument. Take your more vocal folks on the right for instance. They claim “bias” whenever they don’t like something, and “telling it like it is” when it’s “their team.”
Objectivity isn't meant to be a destination in the sense that it's a place that one's reporting can arrive at. It's meant to be a process, one that can never be executed perfectly, but one that has the effect of improving the final product over what it would otherwise be.
As for your question, "when did WWII start?" The answer is that it's an objective fact that there are a number of events that arguably mark the beginning of the war, all of which have varying degrees of merit. Complexity, or the fact that there is no one right answer to a given question, doesn't mean that we have to throw out any effort at objectivity. It just means that we have to dig deeper.
Agreed. The thing is you get this but most people don’t. The right literally says “the biased media won’t cover that” they don’t even say “liberal bias” anymore. Fox News puts a lot of energy into saying they are “just the facts.“ It is seen as a moral good to be objective and factual, and “those other guys are biased.“ There’s this erroneous idea that news and history and such are supposed to be objective that is deeply internalized in the US.
Let me put it another way. This is how the current discourse goes:
“That article is biased therefore we should throw it out.”
What it should be instead is accounting for the bias, acknowledging it, and using it to contextualize the contents. It’s classic throwing baby out with the bath water. Except it’s incredibly deliberate and based on a moral imperative that does not make sense.