Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nothing is unbiased. Look at any news article from a credible source, and you'll find even the tiniest word - perhaps only 3 letters long - that can change the tone of the piece in a hot second.

Well balanced means
- both sides are presented with the same amount of material
- with the same quality of sources
- absent of any words that can persuade a reader to take one side over the other

virtually impossible

I don't think that's a good definition of unbiased. Not all positions are equally supported by facts, and giving equal time regardless of the evidence is part of the problem with news. If we had to give equal time to people who believe the earth is flat vs. round, all for the sake of "balance", then the press has failed to achieve its most basic goal: to inform. Instead, it has given fifty percent of its time to misinformation.

Yes, they are. But you need solid investigative reporting to accomplish that.

Take Holmes's massacre, for example. It was a tragedy that got quite a bit of press. So the focus was on the actual incident. We know very little about his background and what perhaps pushed him over the edge. So in this case, you'd need a reporter comfortable with some sort of psychological analysis. There are specialists out there who find a niche. However, b/c there's no quality control (I blame the internet.), we are used to quick information we can absorb while eating our egg McMuffin on the way to work.

So I have to disagree with you. It's the lazy reporter who can't get both sides - or the lazy news source who won't encourage multiple reporters to gather information from all sides.

Our society has embraced simplistic reporting, and as a result, no one ever fully gets the big picture. It's a vicious cycle.

I don't get your point at all. I have seen DOZENS of articles discussing his psychological condition. I don't know how you have possibly missed it.

I!l take BBC' Bloomberg a little Brian Williams and Stephanopolis filtered by my own brain
CBS,Fox MSNBC, CURRENT are video. tabloids and are not worthy of being called News add Drudge, Huffington Post and the soon to be gone Newsweek.to the lists of 3rd rate sources leaving Rolling Stone Vanity Fair as leaders inestagative reporting and the Economist as the best financial world polotik source
Goggle tends to present all sides.
Radio is a sad joke, providing provacature entertainment nothing, but comic relief in most local markets.
the on line London Times, Haaretz. Al jeezera will fill the needs of most news junkies like be. One more PARS For middle east

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:... Not all positions are equally supported by facts, ...

Yes, they are. But you need solid investigative reporting to accomplish that. ...

I agree with your point that journalists should dig up the facts on both sides. But if they know that one side is just plain wrong, they ought to say that and not act as though "balanced" means treating lies and the truth with equal respect just because they want to look like they are being "fair" to the two sides.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nothing is unbiased. Look at any news article from a credible source, and you'll find even the tiniest word - perhaps only 3 letters long - that can change the tone of the piece in a hot second.

Well balanced means
- both sides are presented with the same amount of material
- with the same quality of sources
- absent of any words that can persuade a reader to take one side over the other

virtually impossible

I don't think that's a good definition of unbiased. Not all positions are equally supported by facts, and giving equal time regardless of the evidence is part of the problem with news. If we had to give equal time to people who believe the earth is flat vs. round, all for the sake of "balance", then the press has failed to achieve its most basic goal: to inform. Instead, it has given fifty percent of its time to misinformation.

Yes, they are. But you need solid investigative reporting to accomplish that.

Take Holmes's massacre, for example. It was a tragedy that got quite a bit of press. So the focus was on the actual incident. We know very little about his background and what perhaps pushed him over the edge. So in this case, you'd need a reporter comfortable with some sort of psychological analysis. There are specialists out there who find a niche. However, b/c there's no quality control (I blame the internet.), we are used to quick information we can absorb while eating our egg McMuffin on the way to work.

So I have to disagree with you. It's the lazy reporter who can't get both sides - or the lazy news source who won't encourage multiple reporters to gather information from all sides.

Our society has embraced simplistic reporting, and as a result, no one ever fully gets the big picture. It's a vicious cycle.

Anonymous wrote:No. And it's good because nobody trusts the press anymore. It was never unbiased ... It was always liberal in the past until fox news. Now with the Internet , social media, talk radio, fox news, drudge, brieghtbart, wall street journal... Etc.... The liberal vice on the message has been broken. As a conservative, if I read the Post, I just go straight to sports and business ... No political lecturing. I NEVER read the new York times because they somehow get politics even into the sports page...they are rabid and insane. The Internet and talk radio are so satisfying to me sinse they infuriate liberals the way I was infuriated by the mainstream and monopolistic press all those years . It's great that talk radio dominates radio rankings, fox news dominates cable and drudge is the dominant print news driver. It's because conservatives outnumber liberals 2 to 1.

Who's the kook? And what is in his Kool Aid?

Anonymous wrote:No. And it's good because nobody trusts the press anymore. It was never unbiased ... It was always liberal in the past until fox news. Now with the Internet , social media, talk radio, fox news, drudge, brieghtbart, wall street journal... Etc.... The liberal vice on the message has been broken. As a conservative, if I read the Post, I just go straight to sports and business ... No political lecturing. I NEVER read the new York times because they somehow get politics even into the sports page...they are rabid and insane. The Internet and talk radio are so satisfying to me sinse they infuriate liberals the way I was infuriated by the mainstream and monopolistic press all those years . It's great that talk radio dominates radio rankings, fox news dominates cable and drudge is the dominant print news driver. It's because conservatives outnumber liberals 2 to 1.

I can't tell whether you're being deliberately funny, or whether you actually believe these things you have just stated.

There are lot of differences between the legacy mainstream media and the self-identified, amateurish "conservative" media. Allow me to point out just a few:

-- To the extend bias does exist in the legacy media (and really, it doesn't), it doesn't reflect a deliberate agenda. The number of editors and producers and checks and balances involved in the production of a news story generally prevents this. A lot of accusations of "bias!" are more easily translated into, "Hey! They didn't include my talking points and my talking points only!" A favorite trick of the right is to accuse the media of bias for "omitting" an angle that, frankly, may not even be valid or relevant to the story or to accuse the right-wing of ignoring something that isn't really even newsworthy to begin with. This is a favorite technique of "Newsbusters." Here is a classic example: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2012/08/04/ap-story-ex-ala-gov-siegelmans-return-prison-avoids-naming-his-party. Should AP have said the ex-governor was a Democrat? Sure, I guess, but I'm more willing to believe that the omission was an oversight rather than a conspiracy. The problem with accusations of bias is that every one finds conspiracy.

-- Legacy media reports facts that actually happened. Conservative media tends to invent them in an effort to report things that never happened but really sound like they'd whip their followers into a frenzy. The examples of this are just too many, but one particularly hilarious recent one involved Fox News's reporting that the EPA had deployed surveillance drones to monitor Montana ranchers. This led to the equally hilarious letter by Denny Rehberg to the EPA demanding this stop. Of course, EPA was never doing this to begin with and calmly stated so, humiliating Rehberg. Rehberg's explanation was that it had to be true because he only reads the right-wing press. Whoops. (http://strawmanchronicles.com/2012/06/20/the-supply-chain-of-a-lunatic-right-wing-story-that-duped-representative-rehberg/). Then there are the James O'Keefe Project Veritas videos, none of which depict actual sets of facts but were deliberately manipulated to ratify a preconceived story line. Whatever biases you may find in the mainstream media, the legacy media generally doesn't set out to deliberately lie to readers and viewers like the conservative media does.

-- The right wing media generally seeks to manufacture news and deliberately cheer-lead right-wing memes. You saw this time and time again with the Tea Party movement. The legacy media's coverage of the Tea Party was criticized largely because it wasn't fawning enough, but being skeptical of something does not equal bias. The Chick fil-A news of the last week is another example. I read criticisms that the mainstream media "ignored" the story, and then when I provided hundreds of links, the critic moved the goalposts and sniffed at how X, Y, and Z newspapers didn't put the coverage of the long lines on Chick fil-A Appreciation day on the front page (as if the incident was just as newsworthy as the Olympics, the conflict in Syria, the election, implementation of the Affordable Care Act, or any number of important things happening.)

-- The legacy media tends to be very patriotic and domestically-owned, whereas the most visible examples of the conservative media are owned by foreigners. I'm not exactly sure WHY Fox News hates America, but I suspect it has something to do lining the pockets of the corrupt Murdoch family.

As for the numbers, it's simply not true that conservatives outnumber liberals 2-1. Drudge's influence has waned. Twenty times more Americans watch network news (about 20 million) than do Fox News (about 2 million) . (http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser/category/evening-news-ratings). And no one BUT conservatives even listens to AM radio anymore, unless you're looking for a baseball game on the highway and you don't have satellite radio. So, it's really not a numbers thing -- the hardcore conservatives cling to their own extraordinarily unprofessional media and consume it voraciously, but a very loud echo chamber really doesn't translate to actual influence. You're still at the fringes and the margins.

People aren't unbiased. They have emotions, experiences, and opinions that influence their perceptions. That is true for journalists as well as the rest of us. I actually find sites that reference other sites and acknowledge their own biases to be the best sources of news.

My favorite for this is instapundit, a blog written by a libertarian law professor. I don't agree with him on many things, but I appreciate that he seems to acknowledge his own biases.

Anonymous wrote:Nothing is unbiased. Look at any news article from a credible source, and you'll find even the tiniest word - perhaps only 3 letters long - that can change the tone of the piece in a hot second.

Well balanced means
- both sides are presented with the same amount of material
- with the same quality of sources
- absent of any words that can persuade a reader to take one side over the other

virtually impossible

I don't think that's a good definition of unbiased. Not all positions are equally supported by facts, and giving equal time regardless of the evidence is part of the problem with news. If we had to give equal time to people who believe the earth is flat vs. round, all for the sake of "balance", then the press has failed to achieve its most basic goal: to inform. Instead, it has given fifty percent of its time to misinformation.

Sorry spelling... I phone typing!^^^

No. And it's good because nobody trusts the press anymore. It was never unbiased ... It was always liberal in the past until fox news. Now with the Internet , social media, talk radio, fox news, drudge, brieghtbart, wall street journal... Etc.... The liberal vice on the message has been broken. As a conservative, if I read the Post, I just go straight to sports and business ... No political lecturing. I NEVER read the new York times because they somehow get politics even into the sports page...they are rabid and insane. The Internet and talk radio are so satisfying to me sinse they infuriate liberals the way I was infuriated by the mainstream and monopolistic press all those years . It's great that talk radio dominates radio rankings, fox news dominates cable and drudge is the dominant print news driver. It's because conservatives outnumber liberals 2 to 1.

I agree, OP. but I'm afraid it's an impossible task to find a news source all will agree is unbiased. Even if you do find a source that is objectively unbiased, the side it does not favor will still CLAIM it's biased and refuse to accept its reporting as true.

I actually think there's a lot of unbiased and fairly reported news out there. But partisans will always try to explain away unfavorable news by attacking the messenger.

FWIW, I've given up trying to have real discussions with political partisans on either side; the partisans seem incapable of having a real discussion that is not skewed toward proving their side is right. The only people I can talk to about that stuff are the political agnostics, who are hard to find.

If you do have to talk with someone about political issues, I'd suggest trying to avoid the politics entirely, and just talk about the substance of the issue itself. Assure the other person repeatedly and loudly that you're sure her preferred candidate/party is right on these issues, but that you just want to understand the facts better. Otherwise, she'll just keep repeating the talking points her favorite TV pundit fed her.

Nothing is unbiased. Look at any news article from a credible source, and you'll find even the tiniest word - perhaps only 3 letters long - that can change the tone of the piece in a hot second.

Well balanced means
- both sides are presented with the same amount of material
- with the same quality of sources
- absent of any words that can persuade a reader to take one side over the other

virtually impossible

Anonymous wrote:I want to hear from liberals and conservatives on this one. I like to discuss politics, but every time I site my sources, someone claims that the source is left-leaning. Whenever my conservative friends site a source, it usually comes from FOX News or some conservative blog. So, are there ANY news sources that we all agree are unbiased? How do you get your unbiased news? Is it even possible? Do you think that's what's wrong with our country and to blame for all this hate and fear mongering? That most of us don't know how to find reliable news even if we want to?

One source that I consider to be informative and unbiased is Meet the Press, but my conservative friends do not agree.

I am a conservative and I think, with Stephanoplous (sp) it's pretty close to unbiased. Amanpour was another issue, but, thankfully, she is gone.

Anonymous wrote:I want to hear from liberals and conservatives on this one. I like to discuss politics, but every time I site my sources, someone claims that the source is left-leaning. Whenever my conservative friends site a source, it usually comes from FOX News or some conservative blog. So, are there ANY news sources that we all agree are unbiased? How do you get your unbiased news? Is it even possible? Do you think that's what's wrong with our country and to blame for all this hate and fear mongering? That most of us don't know how to find reliable news even if we want to?

One source that I consider to be informative and unbiased is Meet the Press, but my conservative friends do not agree.

The best source is Real Clear Politics. It's not unbiased but it gives you both perspectives for all issues.

I want to hear from liberals and conservatives on this one. I like to discuss politics, but every time I site my sources, someone claims that the source is left-leaning. Whenever my conservative friends site a source, it usually comes from FOX News or some conservative blog. So, are there ANY news sources that we all agree are unbiased? How do you get your unbiased news? Is it even possible? Do you think that's what's wrong with our country and to blame for all this hate and fear mongering? That most of us don't know how to find reliable news even if we want to?

One source that I consider to be informative and unbiased is Meet the Press, but my conservative friends do not agree.