I had such high hopes for that wikinews thing. I'd gladly pay for unbiased reporting. Maybe all the recent political fiascos (in many nations) will start making people more receptive to the idea.
I think we need to distinguish what specifically we're against, and that's hyper-partisanship. Working backwards from how a story might affect a party or candidate. Cherry-picking details to assemble a case where giving even a slightly fuller picture would present the opposite.
But fundamentally for news to be interesting it really does have to convey a story, to engage the reader's sense of drama somehow.
I am not being rhetorical. It is a genuine question which I am highly interested in.
Even though I don't believe in the existence of completely unbiased news but I do believe that there is a scale here on which we could rank news for bias(or some other more appropriate term). I just don't know what the mechanism for that would be?
We do know of some obvious sources of bias that would be good place to start. Like separating financial incentives from reporting. But that is not the only major source of bias.
By stark contrast, Bloomberg's controversial piece on alleged Chinese spy hardware had no named sources and no references for readers to follow up on, and furthermore companies Bloomberg alleged to have been compromised all reported the allegations were false. The piece even featured an artist's idea of what the hardware might look like, not an image of an actual device, and the only way to know it was an artist's rendition was to read the fine print under the picture.
I'm not sure there's any way to know the truth, but the article should not have been published, in my opinion, without some way for readers to dig further into the available facts independently of Bloomberg's reporting.
Having sources doesn't eliminate bias.
My point is that sources allow follow-up. Even if, in the extreme case, the sources are garbage, that's still useful information. Bias is to be expected from journalists but disinformation is not, and disinformation thrives when it's divorced from sources/context.
Smarter Every Day did an episode in which a journalist explained how to look for sources when something (in her example, a climate change meme) seems potentially dubious, which highlights an example where the source is actually great and the bias is one we'd normally find positive, but the way the information is recontextualized is misleading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUiYglgGbos
Lack of coverage can form opinions just as strongly as coverage can.
FWIW, as a former fan of Greenwald, his editor came out looking like a far better journalist than he did in that exchange.
The correlation between the quality of research/argumentation and the amount of hyperlinks in the text is essentially zero, and some of the worst partisan hacks of all political stripes are prolific generators of footnotes and links.
Greenwald provides no more evidence for the actual claims about Biden's computer than Bloomberg did for the Chinese spy story. He does of course provide a lot more hyperlinks to circumstantial stuff, a lot of angry links to mainstream media not taking the story seriously (which is his main focus) and more sympathetic links to reportage by the likes of the Daily Caller, but the Chinese spy story's credibility certainly wouldn't have been boosted if Bloomberg's house style involved angrily linking to everyone who said they didn't think there was any truth to it and accusing them of mounting a coverup operation, or by links to support the circumstantial case everyone already knows (yes, China can and does mount surveillance operations; yes, Supermicro manufactures in China).
If anything, I'd say the opposite is often the case: aggressive hyperlinking is often a way to encourage people to overlook the obvious bias and thinness of a story is by appealing to the "if it's got lots of hyperlinks it must be complete, accurate and important" strand of faith in stuff that's written down. Ann Coulter and Michael Moore don't fill their books with footnotes because they want their readers to look beyond their biases....
I guess there's also an onus on us readers to do some of our own fact checking. I'm busy though!
How much would it cost to produce a weekly newsletter/newspaper for the town with a sustainable income for one or two people? Maybe $100K/year? Now you're talking about every town resident paying over $10/year--and most won't. Can maybe knock that down with some advertising--of course, now someone has to sell ads too and we have very few businesses in town.
It's weird how the online vs print business models change (source: I ran a newspaper for a while).