Media Observatory – Quantifying Media Bias | Hacker News Reader

Media Observatory – Quantifying Media Bias

mediaobservatory.com

25 pointsThouYS8 comments

This article teaches some useful things about the media landscape, like the main players in the "wholesale" part of the news supply chain. Not sure how deep the described service will be able to categorize and label bias in the normal sense of the word, but it can nonetheless (possibly) prove to be a highly useful tool for media meta analysis.

Will be following this.

Is there a clear, and precise, definition of bias? "Systematic deviation from the truth" sounds like a good start, but truth isn't exactly something that is easily available in practice.

Honestly, similarity measures seems like a good start to build a more robust "bias" definition on, even if it won't be exactly the meaning I suggested above.

You could have two different news sources which are equally true but have a different agenda, talk about different topics, etc.

> "Systematic deviation from the truth" sounds like a good start

"Truth" is such a vague notion bordering on unusable in most rational contexts, as what most people consider "truth" contains some bias or other. When people quarrel over truthfulness is seldom the facts that they disagree on; it is the valuation of those facts in relation to the topic, i.e. relevance.

Not counting the type of bias which is not ashamed to twist the actual facts, but that is a rarity, and easily dismissed.

> When people quarrel over truthfulness is seldom the facts that they disagree on

Eh, I think this now we are at a mostly semantic point: for example, there is nothing strange about arguing there exists some optimal weighting of various facts, and this optimal combination can then justifiably be labelled truth.

> Not counting the type of bias which is not ashamed to twist the actual facts, but that is a rarity, and easily dismissed.

Isolated instances are easily dismissed, but the USA is now ruled by a systematic dismissal of truth so it is not quite so easy.

The problem is narrative setting, it's very easy to take the same facts and truths and present two different narratives.

Unbiased news and journalism should present the facts without a narrative, but this is very dry and doesn't get the same clicks as a breath taking story.

That's not really possible. Some news room decides that the color of a victim's clothes matter to the story, another does not, which one is pushing a narrative?

Uh, you're going to have to give a bit more context to this hypothetical or invoke word-of-god about what choice is "objectively correct".

All I can say is that there are stories where the victims clothes matter greatly (hunting "accident") and others where it doesn't (wire fraud).

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