Ah, the eternal question. How do you respond to this? Applaud and encourage even more thorough self-reflection, or criticize because the self-reflection was not thorough enough?
It is therefore not self-reflection at all. It is merely doubling down on existing dogma by recasting contradictory prior politics as "wrong".
It actually highlights exactly what's wrong with "journalism". The Guardian doesn't report, it advocates.
It intentionally provides biased views in order to sway readers - the exact opposite of what I'm looking for in a news outlet.
I want news that has LOTS of contradictory points of views. One that presents facts without opinion, and strives to relate events without an agenda.
The Guardian is a failure of journalism. If you are not paying for news media, you are the product, not the consumer.
“Massive backwards move in voting rights”. Wow! This sounds bad. So I search the article for what changed (so I can judge for myself). A few paragraphs about the civil right battles of the 60’s. A few more paragraphs about attempts to stop the new law. Ok...one sentence with vague comments about the changes - harder to do absentee ballots (how?) and you limits on helping people vote (like what?). Ok. Well those could be good or bad, depends on the details, right?
Well I finished the article and I still don’t know what these changes are or whether they are bad, because a 10 page news article didn’t explicitly say what they are.
And I’m not arguing the newspaper is wrong in their conclusion. But I read the news to be educated, not force fed opinions.
A better approach would be - explicitly lay out what the changes are (quoting the law is good!), then interview people from both sides on their viewpoints. I’m smart enough to understand the changes and determine which side is right. Hell, maybe both sides are kind of right? Crazy I know.
Being unbiased, and offering multiple points of views is something mature readers value - both in the past and today. It is something a journalist's should aspire to as a matter of professionalism.
Can you make the honest argument that you want a news outlet to not even try to be unbiased when reporting to YOU? My experience with people who advocate biased journalism is that they want others to consume biased journalism that they agree with - because they believe they are immune to the bias.
If you are not paying for news, you are the product and not the consumer. And I specifically choose my news outlets based upon my perception of their quality of journalism, which heavily includes their degree of bias and the depth of their coverage.
Can we simply agree that being less biased is better than being more biased, as a fundamental principle?
Or are you honestly making the argument that you prefer more bias in news you read?
> Diane Abbott, an ally of Sir Keir Starmer's predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, tweeted: "Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool. Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership. Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy."
Granted though they've toned down the headline of the article to "Elections 2021: Conservatives hail historic Labour defeat in Hartlepool by-election"
True. There appears to be no self-reflection that in the future, today's political and moral fashions will be seen as bad, in much the same way that the political/moral fashions of the past are seen as bad now.
(The report has had some attention from the influential political muckraking blog Order Order over the past few days, which is probably why they didn't feel they could sit on it any longer.)
More people should pay attention to Hugh Grant and his Hacked Off campaign about the abuses of the mainstream media in the UK.