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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

That is nihilism, plain and simple.

You can recognize bias and try to avoid it, like Wikipedia, by requiring credible citations and having processes to avoid editorial bias from impacting the end result (which it obviously did, eventually, as we're reading about here). Like CNN, the WSJ, NYT, Bloomberg, WP, and many other sources of information (across the political spectrum) do every day.

Or you can go the route of Fox news, take a pronounced editorial bias that takes clear precedence over reporting facts. I would post video of Jeanine Pirro or Hannity, but it seems unecessarily crude.

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This ignores the problem of bias by ommission, where an editor merely doesn't include something that goes against their bias. This is impossible to solve with sources because editors still need to be able to choose to ignore something they see as unimportant.

It also ignores that the degree to which a sources "credibility" derives from your agreement with it, and therefore its political bias. When a source you agree with says something wrong, this is seen as an honest mistake, but when you disagree with them, it acts as a tarnish on their credibility forever more. Wikipedia editors can use "credibility" to prevent others from correcting their ommissions.

Credibility is earned and lost. Question if this article would happen if the source material was Alex Jones/Infowars. There would not be an article about "British politics bias" there. It's noteworthy if they concede that there aren't sinister forces trying to steal your precious bodily fluids.

The only reason the posted article exists and that we are having this thread is that Wikipedia takes pains to be unbiased and has some expectations of being so by reputation.

>having processes to avoid editorial bias from impacting the end result

>like CNN, WP, NYT

Um... really? Are you saying those three specifically aren’t putting out very biased results? You could be left of Marx and know that isn’t true for those three specifically. Esp CNN!

The only explanation here is a different topic, that you yourself are so biased that you think CNN is putting out good journalism.

Yes. All of those outlets attempt to put out unbiased news. CNN is "left of Marx"? I sincerely hope you are being sarcastic.

ps: instead of downvoting, why don't you do something more effective, and post an example of biased reporting by CNN (and something that isn't a story about a biased article that resulted in reporters being disciplined or fired)

The person youre responding to isnt saying CNN is “left of Marx”, they’re saying a reader to the left of Marx politically could tell that CMN is biased

CNN, WP, and NYT basically do just present the facts in their reporting. To the extent that it's a big deal when they put out a falsehood and people have gotten fired. Opinion sections are obviously different.

CNN constantly uses loaded words in their reporting, along with more subtle things like condescending smiles when a person is talking who does not hold a left-wing opinion.

The news is almost all factual but is meant to swing a person's opinion in just about every way without actually citing false facts (unless the subject is WMDs in Iraq). It is probably the best TV news source we have in the US but it still sets a fairly low bar in terms of objectivity.

Oftentimes, just leaving out certain facts while including others can have just as much of an influence as citing false facts outright, especially when done repeatedly.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cnn/

We all know that even a composition of words used (or avoided) to report a fact may be very loaded. And it just how it happens in all media, big and small, because apparently journalists are humans, and editors are humans. There are worse, and better cases, but there's no such thing as 100% neutral reporting.

At least during the 2016 primaries, they were basically just mouthpieces of the Clinton campaign.

That's just not true.https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-donald-trump-hacked...

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaig...

The Clinton campaign specifically asked the news media (including CNN, WP, NYT) to increase coverage of Trump (as well as Carson and Cruz). This is so that they'd either have someone easier to beat in the case of these 'pied piper' candidates, or pull a stronger opponent farther right come the general.

Nate Silver didn't know about this in March of 2016 when he wrote that article.

This is the most inconvenient truth of the entire 2016 Campaign. Hillary requested Trump to be propped up as someone she "knew" she could beat. If she had just played fair, she might have actually won against Jeb who the GOP actually wanted.

Don't like Trump? Thank Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and the media for playing along.

I'm sorry but out of those only the WSJ and Bloomberg are what I consider impartial, with NYT doing a better job than CNN and WP because they at least refrain from loaded language, though are not entirely unbiased in what they choose to report.

> That is nihilism, plain and simple.

I don't understand what you mean by this. What exactly do you mean by nihilism in this context?

The general shape is:

"Nobody can avoid being X, so therefore X is pervasive, and it is pointless to try to constrain X"

In this case, it's "everyone has bias, so being unbiased is possible, therefore all viewpoints are equally valid and should be presented as such".

You can substitute X with greed, violence, jealousy... any human failing, and it can be used as a method to justify poor behavior by appealing to epistemological or moral nihilism (all knowledge, morality). It's essentially the last refuge of people backed into a corner of epistemic closure and an attempt to avoid reconciling their worldview with reality but rejecting that there is any knowable basis for morality or truth.

>rejecting that there is any knowable basis for morality or truth.

Which is correct. There is no such thing as The Morality or The Truth or The Good. They are but figments of our imagination, byproducts of a mind that's evolved to generate patterns and see order in the chaos that is reality. Blame Plato's witchcraft.

The golden rule is so trivially easy, has been repeated in multiple cultural and historical contexts, and provides a reasonable basis for all moral philosophy. If you want to indulge epistemological nihilism then please turn in your laptop and cell phone, because you don't even want to know how many things they take for grant as "The Truth".

"Nobody can avoid being X, so therefore X is pervasive, and it is pointless to try to constrain X"

That's not a nihilist. It's being defeatist. Giving up because you can't win is defeat. Giving up because there's really no point in the first place is nihilism.

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