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Comment by owisd | Hacker News Reader

The problem with trying too hard to neutrally report both sides of a story is that's not unbiased either, it's just biased in favour of the side that can lie the most convincingly.

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I am so, so tired, of "both sides" reporting. How about just report the facts instead?

It's a rare issue that you can't swing both ways by selecting the subset of facts to focus on. Attention doesn't just matter, it's all that matters. This is why adversarial forums are so important even if they so often degenerate into shouting past one another: each side has the ability and motivation to bring its strongest facts, so they are at least present in the discussion, even if debate tactics add tons of noise and confirmation bias dampens the effects.

Yes, in principle, but I object to "reporters" merely quoting people instead of attempting to actually verify if what they said has any basis in reality.

That being said, I'm not sure how much this actually matters, trump seems to pretty comprehensively prove that people would rather hear lies, even if they know they are lies.

Because there’s basically no such thing and choosing which facts you report is a huge source of bias anyway

Nearly all political issues are rooted in philosophical differences of opinion. "The facts" are merely the icing on the cake that various factions use to lure people to their ideology. Factual reporting is better than direct opinion reporting, but both are inherently interpreted by people in the context of the Overton window.

You're not wrong, but very often those philosophical differences are being masked by lies.

I don't want to get into the gory details in this tiny text box, but any number of current fear based political campaigns use wildly "distorted" facts to bolster their arguments, and most of the time reporters just blindly repeat whatever the person says without attempting to verify it.

First you'd have to get people to agree on what a fact is, let alone what the facts are.

It's also naturally biased in favor of whoever is more extreme. It's like trying to balance a scale so you place both items on the scale... but one is a rock and the other is a feather.

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