I realize this idea is a bit old fashioned... but how about a news network where they simply try as hard as they can to report objective reality, and we don't worry about whom that favors?
For example, one can cover, say, the illegal immigration situation in the US. While a more liberal outlet might focus on humanitarian concerns of the immigrants, the "good ones" leading virtuous lives in the country a conservative one might focus on the humanitarian concerns of Americans, major crime, etc.
What would be nice is an objective outlet that provides reasonable consideration of both sides in a concise manner, analyzes potential benefit and harm, etc. I'm sure this is the "Good, cheap, or fast" of news.
I don’t usually do this here, as it’s not strictly substantive, but damn that’s a concise and lovely way of putting it.
Every news organization will have bias because every person has bias, and news organizations are made up of people. So the real choice one has to make is: what sort of bias do I want in my news?
The easiest way to identify bias is to look at where the money comes from. In the case of CPB-funded organizations yes, some of their funding is government based, so they're likely to be biased toward reporting that favors government funding for public institutions (or, in the extreme: socialism). However they also receive a significant portion of their funding from volunteer donors, so their reporting is also likely to be biased in favor of people who altruistically give without expectation of any specific ROI.
Now, if you favor small government and self-sufficient individuals who look out for #1 above all else, NPR/PBS is probably not your cup of tea.
Your claim that NPR isn’t biased is quite frankly ludicrous. Their programming features a clear and unmistakeable liberal* bias, and the fact that you seem to be unaware of this probably just means that you share this worldview. That’s absolutely fine with me, but you should really re-examine your idea of objectivity.
* In the American sense of the word.
Edit: I acknowledge that you admit that all news organisations are biased, however I’m responding to your central claim that NPR fills the objective role referred to by GP
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."
All joking aside, I definitely acknowledge NPR's liberal bias. My main point was to "follow the money". More traditional liberal (and conservative) media outlets have funding that is much more "active" (for lack of a better term) than NPR.
Extremely ineffective lobbying would be having elbow-patched public intellectuals testifying about federal funding's benefits on the broader Hegelian dialectic.
No, I'm not.
Here's NPR poorly representing the controversy over the Google memo this summer:
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/08/542180434/google-fires-engine...
Without relitigating the whole kerfuffle, I believe that whether or not you think the media is fair to Damore depends on whether or not you are in agreement with the presuppositions he held when writing the memo.
Grading on a curve, maybe NPR did fine (I've ready Fox News accounts that read similarly), but on topic, some people (Thiel) think there's some monoculture in the media that needs disrupted.
Even former President Jimmy Carter has said so.
So no, there is no unbiased, high quality mainstream media. There is only biased reporting from the right (Fox) and the left (just about everybody else).
“News Coverage of Donald Trump’s First 100 Days”[0]
Summary:
“A new report from Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy analyzes news coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days in office.
The report is based on an analysis of news reports in the print editions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, the main newscasts of CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, and three European news outlets (The UK’s Financial Times and BBC, and Germany’s ARD).”
——-
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...
"Fox was the only news outlet in the study that came close to giving Trump positive coverage overall, however, there was variation in the tone of Fox’s coverage depending on the topic."
When you consider this line especially, with everything else, it seems more consistent with "Trump is unusually unpopular and criticized" than "the media is even more liberal now."
Maybe you should think about your own biases here, before continuing to equate "negative towards Trump" with "liberal/left"?
If I wanted to write a post criticizing Trump I'd have an incredibly easy time doing it from several right-wing perspectives: religious/moral, small government/individual freedom, anti-corruption/pro-transparency, take your pick. It's all fish in a barrel.
But I don't think those are it. When Jimmy Carter says the media is applying a different standard to Trump, it lends credibility to the idea that they just might be.
I honestly believe the difference now is Trump itself. He's uniquely unqualified to be president on every intellectual or moral metric I would consider relevant. Therefore, an objective press would be expected to be far more negative than positive.
The other problem (or clever strategy on the right) is to paint mainstream outlets like NY Times or Washington Post as the 'other side', while basically ignoring truly left-leaning media, like Huffington Post or Vox. In doing so, they portray a spectrum where Fox and Breitbart lean to one side, and NY Times / WaPo lean to the other, with the unbiased position somewhere in the center - when in reality, the average of those publications is pretty far on the conservative side of the spectrum. (Even more so for those who actually believe Fox is 'balanced' and other mainstream outlets are in fact far left.)
I don't think it's necessarily impossible to do good journalism while being biased; I think Vox does a fair amount of good reporting for instance. It is necessary though to clearly distinguish between fact and opinion.
Not really. Carter is a qualified expert in some things, but analyzing media bias is emphatically not one of them. Now, as a statement that seems at odds with Carter's assumed partisan bias, him saying it may be more credible as a genuine statement of belief than of a source said the same thing with either no obvious partisan bias or consistent with obvious partisan bias, but that's not the same as lending credibility to the claim itself.
Have a link? I know Fox is the most watched cable news network. I assume television is still the majority of the way Americans consume the news.
http://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/fox-news-is-basic-cables-most...
Jimmy Carter has been in that seat, and he says the media has been harder on Trump.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017...
Being overly hard on Trump and being overwhelmingly left-leaning isn't necessarily the same thing though. I mean Lindsay Graham who is fairly conservative went on a Trump slam tour before the election. Mitt Romney did the same thing, as did other conservative leaders.
I mean there is a reason Fox blathers on about being most trusted and all that, just like a used car salesman says, "trust me."
Another point: the article points out that, despite the overwhelmingly negative coverage, most of the time, they're using his own voice:
What’s truly atypical about Trump’s coverage is that it’s sharply negative despite the fact that he’s the source of nearly two-thirds of the sound bites surrounding his coverage. Typically, newsmakers and groups complain that their media narrative is negative because they’re not given a chance to speak for themselves. Over the past decade, U.S. coverage of Muslims has been more than 75 percent negative. And Muslims have had little chance to tell their side of the story. Muslims account for less than 5 percent of the voices heard in news reports about Islam.[31] So why is Trump’s coverage so negative even though he does most of the talking? The fact is, he’s been on the defensive during most of his 100 days in office, trying to put the best face possible on executive orders, legislative initiatives, appointments, and other undertakings that have gone bad.
[1] https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...
At the same time, the first unbiased & objective human being has yet to be found.
I would really like an objective, original, pay news service. No ads. NPR is biased to US, BBC to the UK, Al Jazeera to UAE. I can sort of triangulate, but would like an objective source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Accusations...
Also, 'mainstream bias,' for lack or a better term, is still bias. Unjust death and arbitrary transfers of wealth via the military, healthcare lobbies, Wall St, and the Fed Reserve are not any different than murder or theft, they're just part of our economy and education, and our mainstream media sings their praises(it's true of all the mainstream media outlets): https://theintercept.com/2016/09/09/wolf-blitzer-is-worried-...