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Comment by harshitaneja | Hacker News Reader

How do we define "unbiased" here? We can't separate the observations and reporting of it from the humans involved in those.

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.

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I personally liked Glenn Greenwald's approach with the Biden story he published on Substack. He clearly had strong opinions, but he provided references for his assertions that his readers can look into for themselves. The more that we can "hyperlink" journalism to sources, the less an individual writer's bias matters, I think.

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.

When I did my MBA, I was supposed to read a lot of articles on the subject and then form my opinion from them. That was too much work, so I just searched for articles that supported my existing opinion. A lot easier. I never failed to find supporting evidence for my opinion. I originally supposed that this meant I had correct opinions. I've since learned that actually this means there are supporting articles for almost any opinion on a subject.

Having sources doesn't eliminate bias.

Completely agree with all of this.

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

Take it a step further: In journalism, the single largest bias on display at any publication -- from the New York Times down to some hyperlocal startup -- isn't in the content; it's in what they choose not to cover.

Lack of coverage can form opinions just as strongly as coverage can.

> The more that we can "hyperlink" journalism to sources, the less an individual writer's bias matters, I think.

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 personally liked Glenn Greenwald's approach with the Biden story he published on Substack.

FWIW, as a former fan of Greenwald, his editor came out looking like a far better journalist than he did in that exchange.

Unbiased was probably a poor choice of words, there's always biases of some sort. As you said motivations, financial in particular, are the main problem.

I guess there's also an onus on us readers to do some of our own fact checking. I'm busy though!

That's exactly my concern as well. Too busy or unmotivated to do fact checking every single time. So much so that I have stopped looking at most(political and others) news altogether as I feel I am doing disservice by studying multiple sources and fact checking. It just gets too tiring. Now on most political conversations I just excuse myself by saying even though I should care and me choosing to not care is only possible due to my privileged position in society, I choose to use my privilege for the sake of my mental peace.

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