Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Type Ashton" channel.

When it comes to news reporting, I'd argue that being preformatively unbiased at the expense of being honest and useful is honestly a greater failing than being visibly and consistently biased while still being honest and useful. Mind you, one should strive not to allow one's biases to get in the way of accurate reporting, but throwing out accurate reporting in the name of being 'unbiased' is rather defeating the point of the exercise (and if you end up just parroting press releases without any attempt to verify, and report on, the credibility of their contents then you've left the realm of news reporting and are enstead engaging in propaganda with extra steps.)
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@JanBruunAndersen Also the fact that the amount of sugar in one particular type of bread (I think used by Subway?) had enough sugar to count as a luxury good (like cake) rather than a staple (most bread) for the purposes of Irish taxes.
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You're still going to unavoidably end up with some bias even without any editorialising. If nothing else, the program/newspaper/whatever only has so many man hours to spend in a given time period on the sum total of everything they report, so things are going to left out based on the priorites of whoever is in charge of making those decisions... that's bias right there. The thing is, that's not inherently a Problem unless All sources are bias in the same direction and the result is misleading the public.
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@J.L.P.Verne168 'human' and 'unbiased' are unreconcilable. You can only have greater or lesser bias and put more or less effort into being honest and useful. Still 'bias' and 'is engaged in propaganda, not news reporting' are very different. "unbiased" reporting generally leads to 'parroting press releases', which is essentially just propaganda at a remove.
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@NixonThr336ix Freedom of the press refers explicitly to the right to publish (litterally, use a printing press, a number of European rulers were engaging in various methods of limiting and controlling who could use a printing press for what when the idea first came up). That's it. Nothing else.
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@ptolemyauletesxii8642 everyone is always bias... the issue is how much and in what direction. Insisting on a lack of bias (rather than an attempt to be truthful and useful) is mostly just a way to pretend that things you don't like don't 'count'.
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@Antimisinfo As a general rule, I'd tend to assume that the BBC is correct on matters where those who control their funding (and/or have the ability to put them in prison) do not stand to gain from them reporting inaccurate information... And make the same assumption about all other news sources too. Al Jazira (I may be spelling that incorrectly) has a good reputation for useful and honest reporting... on any matter that doesn't involve the interests of the governments of the country (countries?) they opperate from. On those matters one can generally assume they are being dishonest to one degree or another. The same is true of the BBC, and most major news sources in most countries. Of course, then you get Fox News which honestly can't be trusted about Anything...
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That doesn't mean it's balanced, it just means that it's bias doesn't line up with their current interests.
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@TransmitHim That is a noteworthy point... though one does have to wonder how much that came down to the green MPs having better things to do with their time while the right wing idiots did not. I will grant that the answer to that may well be "nope, that wasn't a contributing factor", but it is worth considering that outside factors might play a role. Of course, that is over a 9 year period, so unless neither showed up very often (two appearances is twice as many as one, but rather less meaningful than if both numbers were ten times lager, after all), I'd imagine that such outside factors are unlikely to account for the entirity of the issue.
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One should really demand Honest reporting, rather than 'balanced' reporting. Balanced isn't Unbiased, after all, it's just deliberately biased towards uselessness at best, and frequently little more than propaganda with extra steps.
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And yet the news will still be bias, because the program/network/whatever still only has so many manhours to spend on the sum total of all their reporting in a given time period, and Someone has to decide what to spend those manhours on. Mind you, this particular form of bias only becomes an issue if every source is bias in the same direction such that the result misleads the public.
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New Zealand news anchors also make jokes. Usually only when reporting on less serious matters, and the jokes tend to be fairly mild (sneaky puns that you might not even notice if their facial expression didn't make it fairly obvious are probably the most common, to my recollection). Such jokes are also usually made as part of a transition from one article to the next, rather than part of the reporting, though. Of course, we don't do 24/7 news here. And current affairs shows tend to be a bit more conversational (so, depending on the tone the show is going for, may have more levity).
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If you're talking about Fox News, it was founded explicitly to spike the credibility of the news media in the USA after factual reporting lead to an election result it's founder didn't like. Other channels are mostly just 'outrage sells', which is bad enough in its own right.
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@Alio-k5c Mind you, there are degrees of bias that range from 'honestly trying to report factually, but has inate biases due to life experience and only having so many hours in a day' through 'is entirely propaganda, with effort to hide that making it worse, not better'. News sources should generally strive to be the former rather than the latter, and ideally you want several with different biases available.
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Fox News claims it isn't a news program whenever anyone attempts to reign it in via the courts or the like.
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@TheBaldr ... ... You realise that wildly misrepresenting 'facts' is still 'using' them, right?
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@channeldoesnotexist Here's a fun thing: the crime rates in the middle of American cities plumited when you stopped putting lead in your car fuel.
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@nakenmil I'm lead to beleive that these days most of the US local news channels are owned by the same people who own Fox News, so...
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@bellissimo4520 Impartial, mind you, means reporting things in as factually acurate a manner as possible, not giving equal time to provably dishonest quacks to balance out important public health information or similar nonsense.
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It may or may not be neutral, but being disliked by both sides doesn't mean it's honest, factual, accurate, etc. (it may well be, mind you, that just isn't indicated by this data point). All being disliked by both sides means is that its displayed biases (whatever they may be, however major or minor) do not line up with those of the audience who doesn't like them.
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@xikrx5951 Indeed. Though keep in mind that non-MSM is non-mainstream for a reason. Sometimes it's because it's new, or doesn't align with what the existing powers want you to see... and at least as often it's because it's utterly nonsensical drivil that would do more harm than good if anyone paid it the slightest bit of attention. Mind you, the worse examples of main stream media can also get pretty dire.
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Fox news was intentionally created with the specific goal of spiking media credibility in the USA after factual reporting brought down the owner's prefered president. Fox News Themselves argue that the they're not a 'news program' but rather an 'entertainment program', and thus no one should believe anything they say... at least when they get into legal trouble over their reporting.
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