There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests?

Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.

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boplicity 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Many people think you should avoid having bias. That may be the correct thing in some circumstances, but I think it's better to intentionally have bias, to make that bias explicit, and then to intentionally work within the framework provided by that bias. It should be open, public, and visible.

This allows for full transparency with the audience, increasing trust, while also giving a public "anchor" to guage your work against.

Many organizations do just this. Outside of news it's often just called "culture" or "branding," but it's more important, IMO, to be explicit, public, and clear about this in a news setting, and very much can serve as away to defend against outside influence.

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jvalencia 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's another problem here which is that there isn't enough content. I've on multiple occasions now thrown various news perspectives into AI and asked it to research what the actual facts of a contested issue were. In most cases, it comes down to one quote from one speech. The spin was pages and pages of commentary, most of which is opinion based. The news outlet wouldn't have enough to report if they just told you the quote.

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WarOnPrivacy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Many people think you should avoid having bias.

What we should be demanding is increased competence from our news suppliers. That's the way forward to getting more accurate, critical coverage of interests we dislike.

We've complained about bias for a generation and all we've gotten for it is less accountability and more mistrust.

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nyeah 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On the other hand, some claim that biased news sources can be misleading.

	▲	UtopiaPunk 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I would call into the question the notion that an "unbiased" news source is even possible. What is that? Even in a hypothetical, entirely objective coverage an event, the news publication must decide whether to give such coverage time and space as compared to other stories. That time/space is balanced against corporate advertising and the corporate interests that own the publication (or the government grants, or the subscribers, or whatever the funding is). Choosing to cover or not cover something is bias, before the news article even exists.
	▲	boplicity 14 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This often happens when the news source is not honest about their biases, or if they don't make their biases clear. Fox News is the classic example: Their tagline is "fair and balanced," but their clear objective is to present the Republican/Conservative side of the story. This dishonesty about their bias is at the core of their credibility problems, though, to be clear, it does work in terms of effectively deceiving many people.

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chromacity 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But that's precisely the evolution we've seen in the past 20+ years. For the sake argument, let's say that Fox News started it by more overtly embracing a specific political alignment for stories and opinion programming. Then, MSNBC noticed and went the other way round. Then, "new age" outlets such as Breitbart News and HuffPo took that to its logical conclusion, not even pretending to describe reality and just focusing on portraying the other side as evil and dumb.

The end result isn't that we're more informed and enlightened as content consumers. It's that everyone has their own version of reality. The boring neoliberal consensus of the old had many downsides, but at least it provided some social cohesion in that everyone was more or less reading the same news.

	▲	boplicity an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think Fox News is a good example, because their public messaging has always been "fair and balanced" while at the same time blatantly have a bias; this is just one aspect of how they are clearly deceptive. If instead of calling themselves "fair and balanced" they said they were all about "the Republican Perspective on News" they would immediately be more honest, and it would be easier to understand them as an organization, especially for the people who are regularly deceived by them right now. I'm not arguing that we should try to exaggerate our biases, or even to center them, but rather, we can become more honest by making our biases clear and explicit to those we're communicating with. Many organizations avoid openly addressing their biases, which makes them less honest overall, and more prone to being deceptive. If you're aware of your biases you can actually account for them, as opposed to letting them blind you. Further, if you're public with that awareness, others can account for them as well, and be less likely to be deceived (even accidentally) by your communication. Too often, bias is ignored. It always exists. If we name it and make it visible, then we can have a chance at reducing its potential for deception.

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nathan_compton 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What prevents you have from claiming to have one bias but having another (the one powerful people with money want you to have)?

The problem isn't bias per se - its the desire of some parties to clandestinely shape public opinion. Merely picking a purported bias and then claiming to work along it doesn't do anything to solve the real problem.

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afavour 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.

	▲	idle_zealot 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary? What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.

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autoexec 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.

	▲	idle_zealot 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people That's the structural problem in a nutshell right there. If you're principled enough to do that, then you're at a disadvantage compared to others who are willing to play the access journalism game and the like. You can try to make it up by using your transparency and high standards to attract readers, but in the marketplace that strategy loses. We've seen this play out. Respected news orgs stand on principle, take a hit but manage to get by on a perception of integrity. Eventually leadership shifts to gradually be more and more business-focused, justifying every step as good for readers and investors, speaking first about the delicate balance between integrity and reach and sustainability. Eventually these words become platitudes as more power shifts to those more interested in profit and power games than in anything the institution was founded on. Every step and every change along the way seems reasonable enough, prudent, even. That's the trap you need to defend against. I don't know how you do that as a business, though. Setting yourself up as a nonprofit might help stave it off, but even that doesn't seem foolproof.