[RedHobbit]

That's the frustrating thing isn't it, "fake news" became popularized in the last few years and 'professional journalists' who can't even be bothered to fact check anything are really proving it right. Which is a shame since a free unbiased press is healthy for a society.

[lr4444lr]

I'm with you until your last line. An "unbiased" press I think was a pretty unusual and brief development in the mid 20th century. I have no problem with a partisan press that wears its heart on its sleeve and states its objectives in the masthead: I'm perfectly capable of reading critically, and noting what's omitted as much as what's covered, and I'll know which alternative periodical to seek out for the other side of the story. The pretension to neutrality, to me, seems to result in less information overall.

[lenkite]

It's fine if they are completely biased. That's OK. It is not fine if they run "fact-checkers" and then de-claim anything contrary to what they propagandize as "misinformation" / "raycist" / "nazi". Then they use these fact-checkers to get people banned/doxxed.

Even when their fact-checkers are utterly wrong, they will just update stating "needs more context".

[wutbrodo]

I'm 100% with your premise. When I first got exposure to the world of blogs, I had to quickly learn the skill of rejecting the parts of a piece that are ill-supported while pulling insight from the well-considered[1] parts. This doesn't just extend to rejecting inferences, but to spot-checking facts: studies are not that hard to skim, and important topics will usually have multiple analyses out there that disagree with each other.

But once I started doing that, I couldn't turn it off for regular media sources. Reading articles critically was a huge shock: there are a LOT of really low-quality articles at (eg) the NYT, cases where they get the most basic of facts wrong, and are trivially fact-checked by clicking through to the study they reference.

However. I don't think the vast majority of people are capable of exiting "pour facts into my brain" mode when reading an article. Your position that we should bite the bullet and stop pretending to be neutral would bolster the epistemology of the few who already think critically, but do horrible damage to that of the masses. Maybe the NYT is the best society can do for honest, mass-market journalism. If that's the case, it seems dangerous to give up what little commitment to rigor and honesty they have. I certainly don't want to live in a world where even more people get their news from Breitbart equivalents.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the only successful examples of opinionated, high-quality journalism are denser and less accessible, from The Economist all the way up to specific blogs. Perhaps because simplified narratives are required to hold the attention of John Q Public, and every simplification is an opportunity for bias.

[1] My favorite example of this was when I followed a chain of links and read an article that I disagreed with much about, but retrieved a very novel insight about how to better achieve social justice, a cause which is important to me. As I got deeper into the article, I started having more and more strong disagreements until at a certain pt I realized the guy was a (self-identified) Christian reactionary monarchist, ie a paleo-paleo-conservative. The second thing I learned that day was the meta-lesson that even someone whose values are incredibly alien to me can teach me something tangential to his values.

[watwut]

The mid century press was not unbiased. If you read it with benefit of hindsight, the ideology and limited range of opinions and topics is apparent.