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Comment by bb88 | Hacker News Reader

The original pamphleteers were largely activists. Thomas Paine et. al. People argue they were the prelude to journalists.

There's different kinds of bias/activism.

1. Publishing an opinion with facts (blog post/activism)

2. Publishing only the facts that support your political opinion without your political opinion.

3. Publishing all the facts but only while investigating the people you disagree with (not the people you agree with)

4. Investigating all the facts to settle publicly made allegations by politicians or political figures.

So while 1/2/3 might be seen as activism -- #4 is not. If people make the claim that the IRS is toothless when it comes to enforcement of tax collections on large corporations -- finding out the facts is a good way to help settle public debate.

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Bias is largely unintentional. Your world view impacts how you interpret things and therefore which stories you find interesting or worth discussing. An agenda is different. An agenda is a conscious attempt to lead others to a particular end goal of your choosing. Perhaps you don't think that distinction is important, but I do. News will always be biased, but quality news does not have an agenda.

Here's a snippet of the public apology the NYT published after the 2016 election. Maybe with honesty, or without fear or favor means something different to you than it means to me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/elections/to-our-reade...

>As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism. That is to report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you. It is also to hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.

This is the way these arguments usually go:

1. Reporters and editors cannot possibly be aware of their own bias because they have their own world view, through which they perceive their own reality.

2. Because reporters and their editors cannot be aware of their own biases, fundamentally all news is biased, intentionally or unintentionally.

Your argument depends upon #1 to be True. However, people can know their biases and adjust for it. But at the NYT, editors and reporters are aware of their internal biases, so #1 is actually False.

So then #2 leads to something like #3:

3. Fox News, while intentionally biased, provides balance to the obvious left leaning bias of the NYT because of #1 and #2 -- even if they don't fully vet their stories [1].

So personally I would prefer to get my news from people that research and report facts. Facts, in and of themselves, are unbiased.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Seth_Rich#Fox_News_r...

Moreover, the folks who cry "all news has bias!" to justify explicit propaganda miss the obvious point that bias isn't a binary proposition. A little bit of accidental bias is not the same as deliberately driving an agenda. Real journalism aspires to minimize bias.

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