The fear mongering thing, oh my god. The last 7+ years of my life have been relatively TV free, of course with the exception of a friends house or in a pizza shop, so I don't know much about what happens on there at all. But I stayed with a friend interstate and ended up watching the news a bit and I was bewildered, 'this is what people watch every day?', it's scary to think people are being scared like that, whether or not they're consciously taking it in, it doesn't seem very healthy..
While media is always biased I feel that they roughly fall into three categories (and I'm trying really hard not to judge here): 1) The ones who think they're unbiased and therefore get angry when someone criticise their, assumed, reporting. Often young organisations fall into this category. I haven't watched enough Fox News to tell myself, but from what I hear they might fall into this category. 2) The ones who understand that they can't not be biased and that goes for any media outlet so they try to be upfront about it and then goes on being biased. Huffington Post I'd say fall into this category. 3) The ones who understand that they can't not be biased. But they think that by understanding their own bias they can strive to work backwards from what they want to report, remove as much of their known bias as possible and get closer to what they should report.This is what the BBC tries to do. The USA seems to have a media culture that either wants news to "call it like it is", often resulting in category 1 media; or it is passionate about a perspective enough to work towards it's goals, often resulting in category 2 media. The media climate simply doesn't allow much for category 3 - even ones that fail to remove bias. Countries like the UK, Germany or here in Sweden as a greater desire for category 3. Over here, category 1 is seen as failed but category 2 is seen as a downright menace. Americans don't want media that tries to be unbiased because they already see any small bias that doesn't align with theirs as strongly biased in the wrong direction. Not because they're ignorant or mean or anything like that, but because the media landscape has international polarised itself according to bias.
Editorial choices made in service of the business will always grow in a capitalist system. Not because the sensationalist choices come first and bring success, but because capitalism acts as an evolutionary selector. A company that foregoes sensationalism when their competitor does not, loses business. Over time this naturally means that only those who engage in that arms race have the resources and reach to be noticed. Those who made other choices are selected against. With success measured by clickthroughs, whatever gets the most likes and shares proliferates. Not *because* proliferation was the intent of the writer (or message) but almost despite their intentions either way. The process is systemic, disinterested (in the worst way), and utterly amoral.
I think there is something to seeing algorithmic processes as a reflection of our ideal for the way of doing X thing, whether we do it consciously or not. Where that may be an advantage, and we have seen a few times, is that we can see ourselves in our creation, especially the things we don't like. And we can fix it whereas humans are a little harder to fix than rewriting code.
Honestly thats one of the reason i dont even watch the news... It is always carefully worded in a way to be slanted in an effort to get a reaction that they desire to get you to keep watching. Fear mongering is the easiest way.
i feel like the biggest question here is our perception in "bias". what is a bias visible to humans (great example given about choosing only white winners!) is merely a feature of assessment to a computer. as humans, we're taught not to consider things like race or personal fact in, for example, an oscar nomination (yes i went there >:[ ), in reality it would take complete understanding of human consciousness and morality to codify or to establish a complete rulebook in algorithms, competitions, or any sort of decision making. one recurring issue for AI coders is whether or not to create a system that should mimic exactly what a human does, or to create a system that makes up for the flaws of humanity. in the case of facebook and editorial bias, it seems like we as humans are starting to define editorial morality in such a way that we should have our robojournalists be replicas of our human journalists. that's not a good thing or a big thing, and there are advantages and tradeoffs. specifically, i think we're choosing to maximize the unbiased-ness of journalism in exchange for novel ideas that both spawn new ideas and conflict with our current definitions of morality.
The ship of Thaesus wouldn't float. It assumes a ship that had replaced all of its parts. Except if a ship's keel is damaged, it can't be replaced. All of the other bits of structure holding it together rely on their connection to the keel. "Replacing" the keel would exactly the same as building a completely new ship. The old ship of Thaesus would be sleeping on the ocean floor and the new ship might have its name but it isn't the same ship.
Confirmation bias is when you weight evidence more heavily when it confirms you expectations. Excusing a bias is something else entirely. When you excuse a bias it's like you are aware that someone is lying to you and choosing to trust that person even so. It's a bias that favors a comforting fantasy over an uncomfortable truth even while knowing that the one you are choosing is a fantasy. Imagine source A tells you only things that you want to hear, so that everything they say sounds good and confirms your expectations about the world. Also imagine source B talks about a very different world where the things you support are doing more harm than good, you've been wasting your life, and the things you believe are mostly wrong. Now imagine you discover that source A has been saying some things to deliberately mislead you by misrepresenting the way the world is. Would you forgive A for the deception and continue to trust them in the future if your only alternative would be to start listening to B instead? That wouldn't be confirmation bias, but rather a bias toward deliberately closing your eyes to the truth.
Ansatz66 But usually it's not about deception but just a difference of opinion. A perfect example is the Second Amendment. I've heard three different ways to interpret it, they all think they have the "right" way, and think the others are "wrong". Nobody is being purposely misleading, but we tend to agree with the interpretation that allows the laws that we support. BTW. I won't debate gun rights here. That was only an example.
BiPaganMan "But usually it's not about deception but just a difference of opinion." That depends on whether the bias is unconscious or whether they are consciously aware of their bias. If they honestly believe they are fairly representing the world, then that's just a matter of unconscious bias and it's not a deception. On the other hand, a news source may be consciously aware of what its audience wants to hear and may deliberately bias its reporting for the sake of money. If your news source ever acknowledges having a bias, then you know that bias is deliberate and it is a case of deception. An honest news source would stamp out biases rather than acknowledge them.
But attempting objectivity just like bias, is not good or bad itself, but rather just another thing. You can even argue two opposite philosophies can be objective. For example, 99 percent of scientific community believe climate change is majority cause humans. One philosophy might states both belief must be re presently equally, like 1 vs 1 arguments with equal amount of run time.Then there's another philosophy where that 99% must be represented which means experts should have more time to provide the facts, or have more representatives in the argument for it to be objective.
"But attempting objectivity just like bias, is not good or bad itself." Obviously bias is bad. The video was just arguing that bias is omnipresent. Perhaps it makes no sense to criticize a source for being biased when all sources are always biased, but even so bias is still bad. It's just an inescapable bad. Far worse than bias is when some source fails to attempt to be objective. Obviously it will be biased either way, but if the source isn't attempting to be objective then must be deliberately biasing its reporting, or in other words attempting to deceive its audience. This is akin to the difference between saying something false and lying. One comes from mere human fallibility and the other is a malicious act.
Ansatz66 I don't remember if it was this channel or another. I believe the sources I always in the description. Somewhere it stated that 100% of human languages themselves are bias. Lying is not in languages inherently, but it just exists as a limit. I mean think about, love wasn't love until Shakespeare wrote about it in a genius way. Childhood was constructed with child labor laws and a new market for children. Time as what we think about it today wasn't constructed until the railroad. Even in the purity of math, no one, absolutely no one could understand the concept of zero until Newton invented calculus to really understand what happens when you divided zero. My point is that objectivity is a philosophy. You can go many roundabout ways to go about it. We have to cope with bias whether its unintended or intended. Truth-seeking is not on the page, but in the mind.
UnpredictableSB "We have to cope with bias whether its unintended or intended." We don't have to cope with bias alone. We can work together to overcome our biases by learning to recognize them and correct them. Unintended bias is the residue of bias that remains after we do all that we can to discover and correct our biases. Listening to a source with unintended biases means that you and the source are working together to try to find the objective truth. Even if you can never reach it, you'll have a better chance when you're not working alone. In contrast, intended bias is a deliberate effort to move away from objective truth. Many sources may be intentionally biased for the sake of grabbing attention, but if you give your attention to such sources then you're joining that source on its journey away from objective truth.
Here's an idea: talk about algorithms. Maybe the ones that pick or have an effect on picking top stories. How do they pick them? Where are the biases? Are they really in the algorithms or do we put them there? Is there NO ONE who can pass you some info on the code that runs and picks and doesn't pick? Also bias is in tires and fabric as an angle.
Bias is inherently negative within the context of objective conversations or reports. Even if bias were not intrinsically negative, its effect on endeavors striving to be objective would be. The larger a company the less bias it ought to have given that bias stems from individuals and a conglomeration of individual biases ought to serve to cancel each other out, resulting in a firm with less bias than any of the individuals comprising it; however, this assumes the presence of a diversity of viewpoints within that firm which is often lacking in media. If a company is full of individuals with entirely homogenous views the result is snowballed bias. Concerning your question of whether we expect news organizations to be unbiased: The answer is no, we don't expect them to be unbiased. However, such organizations generally present themselves as being unbiased/objective, and thus such an expectation of a lack of bias (or at least a lack of intentional bias) would be justified in a less critical/cynical/depressed society.
With all the "spin" that goes on it is hard to be biased for or against something when that something may be spun so much that it isn't actually the something you were for or against in the first place. And now my head hurts.
Good point about all bias not being bad. It's much like discrimination. In some cases, discrimination is is useful, helpful, or even necessary. For example, it would be wise to discriminate between mushrooms that are poisonous from mushrooms that are safe to eat. Only some types of discrimination are bad. Likewise, only some types of bias are bad. In a world full of information, news, data, knowledge, rumor, gossip, urban myths, tall tales, etc. being biased towards more useful, entertaining, or relevant content is a beneficial bias. I'd also like to repeat a point I made in the comments of the original video: that if we encountered truly unbiased news or results, would we be able to recognize that it was unbiased? Or would even it *seem* biased to us?
"In a world full of information, news, data, knowledge, rumor, gossip, urban myths, tall tales, etc. being biased towards more useful, entertaining, or relevant content is a beneficial bias." You don't need to be biased in order to present the content that your audience wants to see unless your audience wants to reject the real world. You can go ahead and focus on things which are useful and entertaining without that being a bias so long as you present those things in their fair context. For example, if you report extensively on crime and lead people to believe that there is a pandemic of crime, then that is biased. In contrast, if you report extensively on crime but make it clear the crimes you are talking about only affect a small portion of a population that is largely free of crime, then you've avoided that bias while still giving people the crime reporting that they want.
I think that some news sources make more effort to avoid bias than others. They are not necessarily more successful-CNN is an excellent example of this-but it's there. Cable news is a common example of a format that is structurally designed to fail at that objective, though, so it's probably not where you should go to test your hypothesis that they're not even trying. There are plenty of blatantly and admittedly partisan news sources that have as their stated goal telling what they see as important, untold stories supporting their party or policy positions; they're not attempting to be bias-free at all, except to the extent that they purport to correct what they see as broader systemic bias. Do you really think that even CNN or MSNBC makes as little effort as them?
I think rather than having news people attempt the impossible of being completely unbiased they just stated their biases upfront. And a news source could decide to be fully leaning one way or make sure to hire people with vastly different views, it would be fine if they were clear about it. Most people already knows that if you want an accurate picture of what's happening you look at more than once source anyways, it would be a lot easier to know you're covering different perspectives, rather than now with them claiming to be unbiased which is inevitably wrong.
There a difference between having an opinion or attempting to further your cause, and being biased. Biased includes connotations of being unfair and dishonest, whether by actively lying or by omission. This is not acceptable. Ever. I do think cable news is generally biased, and so I feel pleasure each time I see their reach shrink, or a studies indicating that they are trusted less. I don't expect people to be perfect, but I do expect them, whether in person or as part of company, to be as accurate and honest as possible.
"Biased includes connotations of being unfair and dishonest, whether by actively lying or by omission." People can have unintentional biases. The end result is the same, but the cause of the bias can simply be a person's perspective on the world and their reasoning skills. If you go into a situation with certain expectations you are more likely to accept confirming evidence and more likely to scrutinize contrary evidence, and this bias can be completely subconscious. Since no one can view the world as a completely blank slate, bias is practically inevitable. Don't consider someone harshly merely for being biased. The kind of bias that should be unacceptable is acknowledged bias. In other words, when someone admits that their reporting has a certain bias it demonstrates that they are aware of the bias and so it is not subconscious. When a source is aware of its bias and does not correct for it, then it is akin to lying, but they may still accept their bias as a good thing if that bias is necessary to appeal to their audience.
When it comes to cable news, especially fox, MSNBC and cnnn; you're not being cynical, they really don't try to be objective at all. In the case of cnn, there was actually a statement from an executive that they would as a network be consciously making theor network more biased because they wanted more ratings and revenue and knew that was the easiest way to do it. There are some news outlets still trying to act in the public interest whether they succeed or not, but those three in particular don't have that as their goal.
The claim all algorithms are biased is incorrect though. Make an algorithm random and there isn't bias. If you say it is biased, the word ceases to be of any use, fully semantically bleached to nothingness.
You should choose some of the comments you respond to randomly, to eliminate your own bias...Oh wait there might be some other hidden bias in the way you chose to choose randomly...oh boy i'm going down the rabbit hole aren't I ?
I'm not sure of this has been discussed, but algorithms don't usually have bias in and of themselves. Yes, the programmer explicitly adding a bias is possible, but in many cases of "inadvertent" bias this is not true. The more likely reason is that /the information put into the system is biased/. An algorithm is only going to reflect patterns from the data that are used for the learning steps. If the data are biased, the algorithm's solutions will appear biased. Ultimately, machine learning processes cannot make up objective solutions to subjective questions; it can only consolidate prior subjective answers and find the features it was programmed to find.
As for the capitalism issues, it is a flaw of the system that can be much stronger in other economic systems do to the lack of economic systems without extrinsic rewards. Communism gives favor to those who support the state, for example.
I still argue that it's hard to fault Facebook for having a bias for certain news organizations over others especially when the news outlets they favored scored better at being unbiased, not being completely unbiased but more unbiased, than their conservative counterparts. Since we don't know the motives behind the decisions to favor some outlets over others we can only judge the outcome of those decisions, which in this case, was extremely biased media outlets who also happened to be conservative media outlets were dropped from the trending section. To me, that's a positive outcome if your concern is people's exposure to biased media. I can't help but think that the bulk of the complaints about Facebook's behavior had little to do with concern about the people's exposure to biased media and more to do with people not being exposed to what the complainer sees as the "correct" media bias. A quick edit: something to consider, does it bother anyone that we have to clarify that certain news organizations are "conservative"? For the longest time and still to this day most news organizations just refer to themselves or are referred to by the public simply as "news outlets". Outside of extremely conservative circles you almost never hear media outlets referred to as "liberal media outlets". CNN does not advertise itself as a "voice for Liberals" unlike outlets such as Breitbart do with conservatism. Shouldn't organizations being proud of their bias be a big red flag that something is wrong? Shouldn't that be a bigger concern than Facebook's decision to not feature these proudly self fashioned biased news outlets?
Googled that for you, www.redbubble.com/people/caddywompus/works/8826865-guardians-of-sunshine?p=t-shirt&style=mens&body_color=black&print_location=front
I don' think you're being cynical when you say that media outlets don't attempt to be unbiased. When I use FB, I click on the comments and get a roll of related articles immediately underneath. Some of those always come from news sources presenting an opposing view. I read those ones first, then read the article that appears in my feed (the one in my feed is surely skewed to my preferred perspective, right?). It's not a good idea to get your news from only one source OR from sources that you know are biased towards a particular perspective, whether they declare that bias or not. You can form your position on a range of issues from a range of sources...that's just sensible.
The fear mongering thing, oh my god. The last 7+ years of my life have been relatively TV free, of course with the exception of a friends house or in a pizza shop, so I don't know much about what happens on there at all. But I stayed with a friend interstate and ended up watching the news a bit and I was bewildered, 'this is what people watch every day?', it's scary to think people are being scared like that, whether or not they're consciously taking it in, it doesn't seem very healthy..
If one breaks down the term "bias," it could be perceived as synonymous with "angle" or "skew," i.e., "what's your angle?"
While media is always biased I feel that they roughly fall into three categories (and I'm trying really hard not to judge here):
1) The ones who think they're unbiased and therefore get angry when someone criticise their, assumed, reporting. Often young organisations fall into this category. I haven't watched enough Fox News to tell myself, but from what I hear they might fall into this category.
2) The ones who understand that they can't not be biased and that goes for any media outlet so they try to be upfront about it and then goes on being biased. Huffington Post I'd say fall into this category.
3) The ones who understand that they can't not be biased. But they think that by understanding their own bias they can strive to work backwards from what they want to report, remove as much of their known bias as possible and get closer to what they should report.This is what the BBC tries to do.
The USA seems to have a media culture that either wants news to "call it like it is", often resulting in category 1 media; or it is passionate about a perspective enough to work towards it's goals, often resulting in category 2 media. The media climate simply doesn't allow much for category 3 - even ones that fail to remove bias. Countries like the UK, Germany or here in Sweden as a greater desire for category 3. Over here, category 1 is seen as failed but category 2 is seen as a downright menace.
Americans don't want media that tries to be unbiased because they already see any small bias that doesn't align with theirs as strongly biased in the wrong direction. Not because they're ignorant or mean or anything like that, but because the media landscape has international polarised itself according to bias.
+
Editorial choices made in service of the business will always grow in a capitalist system. Not because the sensationalist choices come first and bring success, but because capitalism acts as an evolutionary selector. A company that foregoes sensationalism when their competitor does not, loses business. Over time this naturally means that only those who engage in that arms race have the resources and reach to be noticed. Those who made other choices are selected against.
With success measured by clickthroughs, whatever gets the most likes and shares proliferates. Not *because* proliferation was the intent of the writer (or message) but almost despite their intentions either way. The process is systemic, disinterested (in the worst way), and utterly amoral.
Got my second comment on the show. I'm proud.
I think there is something to seeing algorithmic processes as a reflection of our ideal for the way of doing X thing, whether we do it consciously or not. Where that may be an advantage, and we have seen a few times, is that we can see ourselves in our creation, especially the things we don't like. And we can fix it whereas humans are a little harder to fix than rewriting code.
Honestly thats one of the reason i dont even watch the news... It is always carefully worded in a way to be slanted in an effort to get a reaction that they desire to get you to keep watching. Fear mongering is the easiest way.
i feel like the biggest question here is our perception in "bias". what is a bias visible to humans (great example given about choosing only white winners!) is merely a feature of assessment to a computer. as humans, we're taught not to consider things like race or personal fact in, for example, an oscar nomination (yes i went there >:[ ), in reality it would take complete understanding of human consciousness and morality to codify or to establish a complete rulebook in algorithms, competitions, or any sort of decision making.
one recurring issue for AI coders is whether or not to create a system that should mimic exactly what a human does, or to create a system that makes up for the flaws of humanity. in the case of facebook and editorial bias, it seems like we as humans are starting to define editorial morality in such a way that we should have our robojournalists be replicas of our human journalists. that's not a good thing or a big thing, and there are advantages and tradeoffs. specifically, i think we're choosing to maximize the unbiased-ness of journalism in exchange for novel ideas that both spawn new ideas and conflict with our current definitions of morality.
The ship of Thaesus wouldn't float. It assumes a ship that had replaced all of its parts. Except if a ship's keel is damaged, it can't be replaced. All of the other bits of structure holding it together rely on their connection to the keel. "Replacing" the keel would exactly the same as building a completely new ship. The old ship of Thaesus would be sleeping on the ocean floor and the new ship might have its name but it isn't the same ship.
u sick troll!
If you switch between this and the main video for this week the picture on his T-shirt disappears and reappears.
It's always easy to excuse bias when it reflects your own views, dude..
Everyone does that, it's called confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is when you weight evidence more heavily when it confirms you expectations. Excusing a bias is something else entirely. When you excuse a bias it's like you are aware that someone is lying to you and choosing to trust that person even so. It's a bias that favors a comforting fantasy over an uncomfortable truth even while knowing that the one you are choosing is a fantasy.
Imagine source A tells you only things that you want to hear, so that everything they say sounds good and confirms your expectations about the world. Also imagine source B talks about a very different world where the things you support are doing more harm than good, you've been wasting your life, and the things you believe are mostly wrong. Now imagine you discover that source A has been saying some things to deliberately mislead you by misrepresenting the way the world is. Would you forgive A for the deception and continue to trust them in the future if your only alternative would be to start listening to B instead?
That wouldn't be confirmation bias, but rather a bias toward deliberately closing your eyes to the truth.
Ansatz66
But usually it's not about deception but just a difference of opinion.
A perfect example is the Second Amendment. I've heard three different ways to interpret it, they all think they have the "right" way, and think the others are "wrong". Nobody is being purposely misleading, but we tend to agree with the interpretation that allows the laws that we support.
BTW. I won't debate gun rights here. That was only an example.
BiPaganMan "But usually it's not about deception but just a difference of opinion."
That depends on whether the bias is unconscious or whether they are consciously aware of their bias. If they honestly believe they are fairly representing the world, then that's just a matter of unconscious bias and it's not a deception. On the other hand, a news source may be consciously aware of what its audience wants to hear and may deliberately bias its reporting for the sake of money.
If your news source ever acknowledges having a bias, then you know that bias is deliberate and it is a case of deception. An honest news source would stamp out biases rather than acknowledge them.
We all have bias. As he said it's just a thing.
You can't isolate your user base and expect them to stay
wat
Well, North Korea isolates its user base and most of them stay. Though, it is arguable as to whether or not they have a choice...
I _NEED_ that shirt! 0_o
I do see the CBC and the BBC as attempting to be objective.
But attempting objectivity just like bias, is not good or bad itself, but rather just another thing. You can even argue two opposite philosophies can be objective. For example, 99 percent of scientific community believe climate change is majority cause humans. One philosophy might states both belief must be re presently equally, like 1 vs 1 arguments with equal amount of run time.Then there's another philosophy where that 99% must be represented which means experts should have more time to provide the facts, or have more representatives in the argument for it to be objective.
Objectivity has a bias towards there being an actual "truth". If such a thing can exist then objectivity would be about presenting what is true.
"But attempting objectivity just like bias, is not good or bad itself."
Obviously bias is bad. The video was just arguing that bias is omnipresent. Perhaps it makes no sense to criticize a source for being biased when all sources are always biased, but even so bias is still bad. It's just an inescapable bad.
Far worse than bias is when some source fails to attempt to be objective. Obviously it will be biased either way, but if the source isn't attempting to be objective then must be deliberately biasing its reporting, or in other words attempting to deceive its audience. This is akin to the difference between saying something false and lying. One comes from mere human fallibility and the other is a malicious act.
Ansatz66 I don't remember if it was this channel or another. I believe the sources I always in the description. Somewhere it stated that 100% of human languages themselves are bias. Lying is not in languages inherently, but it just exists as a limit. I mean think about, love wasn't love until Shakespeare wrote about it in a genius way. Childhood was constructed with child labor laws and a new market for children. Time as what we think about it today wasn't constructed until the railroad. Even in the purity of math, no one, absolutely no one could understand the concept of zero until Newton invented calculus to really understand what happens when you divided zero.
My point is that objectivity is a philosophy. You can go many roundabout ways to go about it. We have to cope with bias whether its unintended or intended. Truth-seeking is not on the page, but in the mind.
UnpredictableSB "We have to cope with bias whether its unintended or intended."
We don't have to cope with bias alone. We can work together to overcome our biases by learning to recognize them and correct them. Unintended bias is the residue of bias that remains after we do all that we can to discover and correct our biases. Listening to a source with unintended biases means that you and the source are working together to try to find the objective truth. Even if you can never reach it, you'll have a better chance when you're not working alone.
In contrast, intended bias is a deliberate effort to move away from objective truth. Many sources may be intentionally biased for the sake of grabbing attention, but if you give your attention to such sources then you're joining that source on its journey away from objective truth.
Here's an idea: talk about algorithms. Maybe the ones that pick or have an effect on picking top stories. How do they pick them? Where are the biases? Are they really in the algorithms or do we put them there? Is there NO ONE who can pass you some info on the code that runs and picks and doesn't pick? Also bias is in tires and fabric as an angle.
Bias is inherently negative within the context of objective conversations or reports. Even if bias were not intrinsically negative, its effect on endeavors striving to be objective would be. The larger a company the less bias it ought to have given that bias stems from individuals and a conglomeration of individual biases ought to serve to cancel each other out, resulting in a firm with less bias than any of the individuals comprising it; however, this assumes the presence of a diversity of viewpoints within that firm which is often lacking in media. If a company is full of individuals with entirely homogenous views the result is snowballed bias.
Concerning your question of whether we expect news organizations to be unbiased:
The answer is no, we don't expect them to be unbiased. However, such organizations generally present themselves as being unbiased/objective, and thus such an expectation of a lack of bias (or at least a lack of intentional bias) would be justified in a less critical/cynical/depressed society.
With all the "spin" that goes on it is hard to be biased for or against something when that something may be spun so much that it isn't actually the something you were for or against in the first place. And now my head hurts.
Good point about all bias not being bad. It's much like discrimination. In some cases, discrimination is is useful, helpful, or even necessary. For example, it would be wise to discriminate between mushrooms that are poisonous from mushrooms that are safe to eat. Only some types of discrimination are bad. Likewise, only some types of bias are bad.
In a world full of information, news, data, knowledge, rumor, gossip, urban myths, tall tales, etc. being biased towards more useful, entertaining, or relevant content is a beneficial bias.
I'd also like to repeat a point I made in the comments of the original video: that if we encountered truly unbiased news or results, would we be able to recognize that it was unbiased? Or would even it *seem* biased to us?
"In a world full of information, news, data, knowledge, rumor, gossip, urban myths, tall tales, etc. being biased towards more useful, entertaining, or relevant content is a beneficial bias."
You don't need to be biased in order to present the content that your audience wants to see unless your audience wants to reject the real world. You can go ahead and focus on things which are useful and entertaining without that being a bias so long as you present those things in their fair context. For example, if you report extensively on crime and lead people to believe that there is a pandemic of crime, then that is biased. In contrast, if you report extensively on crime but make it clear the crimes you are talking about only affect a small portion of a population that is largely free of crime, then you've avoided that bias while still giving people the crime reporting that they want.
I think that some news sources make more effort to avoid bias than others. They are not necessarily more successful-CNN is an excellent example of this-but it's there. Cable news is a common example of a format that is structurally designed to fail at that objective, though, so it's probably not where you should go to test your hypothesis that they're not even trying.
There are plenty of blatantly and admittedly partisan news sources that have as their stated goal telling what they see as important, untold stories supporting their party or policy positions; they're not attempting to be bias-free at all, except to the extent that they purport to correct what they see as broader systemic bias. Do you really think that even CNN or MSNBC makes as little effort as them?
I've attempted to be unbiased for most of my life. If it's too lofty a goal, can you suggest how I'll learn to stop? Or why I should stop?
just because cable news isn't trying to be unbiased didn't Jean it shouldn't try.
I think rather than having news people attempt the impossible of being completely unbiased they just stated their biases upfront. And a news source could decide to be fully leaning one way or make sure to hire people with vastly different views, it would be fine if they were clear about it. Most people already knows that if you want an accurate picture of what's happening you look at more than once source anyways, it would be a lot easier to know you're covering different perspectives, rather than now with them claiming to be unbiased which is inevitably wrong.
There a difference between having an opinion or attempting to further your cause, and being biased. Biased includes connotations of being unfair and dishonest, whether by actively lying or by omission. This is not acceptable. Ever.
I do think cable news is generally biased, and so I feel pleasure each time I see their reach shrink, or a studies indicating that they are trusted less. I don't expect people to be perfect, but I do expect them, whether in person or as part of company, to be as accurate and honest as possible.
"Biased includes connotations of being unfair and dishonest, whether by actively lying or by omission."
People can have unintentional biases. The end result is the same, but the cause of the bias can simply be a person's perspective on the world and their reasoning skills. If you go into a situation with certain expectations you are more likely to accept confirming evidence and more likely to scrutinize contrary evidence, and this bias can be completely subconscious.
Since no one can view the world as a completely blank slate, bias is practically inevitable. Don't consider someone harshly merely for being biased. The kind of bias that should be unacceptable is acknowledged bias. In other words, when someone admits that their reporting has a certain bias it demonstrates that they are aware of the bias and so it is not subconscious. When a source is aware of its bias and does not correct for it, then it is akin to lying, but they may still accept their bias as a good thing if that bias is necessary to appeal to their audience.
This is all cool and all, but where can I get that shirt you're wearing, Mike? I require it.
When it comes to cable news, especially fox, MSNBC and cnnn; you're not being cynical, they really don't try to be objective at all. In the case of cnn, there was actually a statement from an executive that they would as a network be consciously making theor network more biased because they wanted more ratings and revenue and knew that was the easiest way to do it.
There are some news outlets still trying to act in the public interest whether they succeed or not, but those three in particular don't have that as their goal.
Would it be fair to go a step further and propose that bias is media? Content and form are products of a bias which make up everything we consume.
The claim all algorithms are biased is incorrect though. Make an algorithm random and there isn't bias. If you say it is biased, the word ceases to be of any use, fully semantically bleached to nothingness.
You should choose some of the comments you respond to randomly, to eliminate your own bias...Oh wait there might be some other hidden bias in the way you chose to choose randomly...oh boy i'm going down the rabbit hole aren't I ?
I'm not sure of this has been discussed, but algorithms don't usually have bias in and of themselves. Yes, the programmer explicitly adding a bias is possible, but in many cases of "inadvertent" bias this is not true. The more likely reason is that /the information put into the system is biased/. An algorithm is only going to reflect patterns from the data that are used for the learning steps. If the data are biased, the algorithm's solutions will appear biased.
Ultimately, machine learning processes cannot make up objective solutions to subjective questions; it can only consolidate prior subjective answers and find the features it was programmed to find.
As for the capitalism issues, it is a flaw of the system that can be much stronger in other economic systems do to the lack of economic systems without extrinsic rewards. Communism gives favor to those who support the state, for example.
your experience with cable news is not different then mine
Dude, were you okay during this recording? You seemed to stumble a lot more than normal. Just asking cuz I worry about folks even ones I never met.
man i need Double speed on mobile
I still argue that it's hard to fault Facebook for having a bias for certain news organizations over others especially when the news outlets they favored scored better at being unbiased, not being completely unbiased but more unbiased, than their conservative counterparts. Since we don't know the motives behind the decisions to favor some outlets over others we can only judge the outcome of those decisions, which in this case, was extremely biased media outlets who also happened to be conservative media outlets were dropped from the trending section. To me, that's a positive outcome if your concern is people's exposure to biased media. I can't help but think that the bulk of the complaints about Facebook's behavior had little to do with concern about the people's exposure to biased media and more to do with people not being exposed to what the complainer sees as the "correct" media bias.
A quick edit: something to consider, does it bother anyone that we have to clarify that certain news organizations are "conservative"? For the longest time and still to this day most news organizations just refer to themselves or are referred to by the public simply as "news outlets". Outside of extremely conservative circles you almost never hear media outlets referred to as "liberal media outlets". CNN does not advertise itself as a "voice for Liberals" unlike outlets such as Breitbart do with conservatism. Shouldn't organizations being proud of their bias be a big red flag that something is wrong? Shouldn't that be a bigger concern than Facebook's decision to not feature these proudly self fashioned biased news outlets?
love your t-shirt were did you get it ?
Googled that for you, www.redbubble.com/people/caddywompus/works/8826865-guardians-of-sunshine?p=t-shirt&style=mens&body_color=black&print_location=front
I don' think you're being cynical when you say that media outlets don't attempt to be unbiased. When I use FB, I click on the comments and get a roll of related articles immediately underneath. Some of those always come from news sources presenting an opposing view. I read those ones first, then read the article that appears in my feed (the one in my feed is surely skewed to my preferred perspective, right?). It's not a good idea to get your news from only one source OR from sources that you know are biased towards a particular perspective, whether they declare that bias or not. You can form your position on a range of issues from a range of sources...that's just sensible.
I'm sorry but the BBC it puts all others to shame
FIRST. (Which is now relevant again.)
74th
Tmw you post a controversial comment in an attempt to get Mike to talk about it and you fail.
first
second?
First?