Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
Whether it’s AMAs, advice, how your week is going, or a question that’s at the
back of your mind, it can likely go here. — This community’s icon was made by
Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-4.0 license
[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/].
Bonus points for articles or links to said facts. I demand rabbit-holes to explore
I’d like to see a return to this, or a return to the media being generally unbiased if not always truthful. Instead I flip between CNN and Fox and try to distil the facts, then research online… tomorrow I’ll do it all over again.
This is still true for the BBC in the UK and all that happens is that anytime the BBC wants to talk about trans issues, they have to also talk about how transphobia is cool, actually.
Fundamentally I find that following media is a fool’s errand. What are you actually learning by doing that, really? I agree that informing oneself on the state of the world and the country is important, but at the end of the day it is impossible to be objective, and even if you and the media were, what good would it be?
I too am sick of both-sides-ism for the same and similar reasons. It’s not the case that each side in every debate is argued in equally good faith, nor that each has equal scientific basis, etc. I think the net effect of a policy like this would just be to entrench the culture of giving any and every blatantly hateful/wrong opposite a legitimizing platform.
Personally, I’d prefer the abandonment of the pretense that media can ever be unbiased, in one way or another. I’d rather media be upfront about its biases, and have journalists be encouraged to try to be as skeptical as possible of their own side (or something like that) while being open about which side is theirs, rather than have “unbiased” and “neutral” news sources, written by people who are humans who therefore do have opinions, that inevitably still do shit like repeatedly post identical transphobic op-eds, or articles with titles like “Locals dismayed over homeless encampment”, and simultaneously claim to be unbiased. That type of title regarding the homeless, as an example, prioritizes the housed locals who are upset (about area cleanliness, sidewalk accessibility, drugs in proximity to their homes, whatever) as being the newsworthy story, and their opinions as being the ones you should take into consideration, rather than prioritizing the fact that a bunch of people - who are also local to that area but not acknowledged/valued as such - are unhoused and living in misery and exposed to temperatures, etc, as being the newsworthy story. Regardless of how you feel about the homeless personally, it’s an article title like that takes a perspective on a situation, privileges one party in the situation over another, but it presents that perspective as ostensibly unbiased and purely factual, and in so doing it just hides its own bias rather than actually eliminating it.
And, in that particular case, I personally believe it encourages the populace as a whole to devalue and dehumanize unsheltered and drug-addicted humans in favor of only caring about whether housed people can see them or not. But if the journalist was able to be upfront with and maybe even explicitly acknowledge their own bias in some standardized way in the article, it might make that bias less invisible and lead people to put more consideration into the matter in general and be less likely to automatically absorb whatever the bias in the article is.
I also just think that truly unbiased, purely factual media is impossible to achieve, and that journalism’s traditional quest to do so is a fool’s errand that historically has not worked out.
I wonder whether/how journalism’s core tenants and cultures might differ between the Anglophone world and other countries in other parts of the world, like South America or Africa. I feel like differences like that could go fairly unnoticed because of the language-barrier - like, how often do Americans or British folks read translated news articles from other languages, and how often do Journalism students in the anglosphere learn about other countries’ home-grown journalistic traditions or methods? I’d be willing to bet the profession of journalism as practiced in the west would tend to almost-exclusively consider only academic articles and philosophies generated by its own cultures and institutions, seeing as that’s how it has tended to go in the sciences and other disciplines.
There have been many separate occasions that some amazing scientific discovery was made in one country, like China or Italy or Greece or wherever, but the anglophone science community didn’t find out about it at all because it wasn’t published in English or in a popular English journal (or, in earlier times, wasn’t talked about amongst anglophone science societies or in scientists’ letters or books). I think I remember reading that Mendel, the Austrian monk who discovered the basics of alleles and the mechanism of genetic variability and inheritance, by way of years upon years of careful and meticulous experiments, went almost entirely unknown as a scientist (until decades after his death, when his work was rediscovered, and when other people discovered the same things independently or replicated his experiments), and that this may have been due in part to the fact that he was Austrian and published and presented only in his language. He also just didn’t do a lot to promote his work, supposedly, but I remember reading that the initial crickets in response to his life’s work rather discouraged him from further promoting it and from further scientific endeavors.
/pardon, several of those paragraphs are a bit run-on and word-salady perhaps, aaaand I’ve gone on several tangents, but I must stop editing this comment now for fear of spending too much time on social media vs the rest of my life.
Replying to my own comment instead of making said comment even longer:
I hope that, for all the problems ChatGPT and co. is introducing to the world, it might sufficiently grease the wheels of translation to make communication between different countries’ scientists and scholars much easier. Imagine if every scientific paper could just be auto-translated, even if imperfectly, well-enough to be easy to read and reasonably understandable, at least enough to indicate where someone might want to dig further.
Granted, this speculation ignores the problem that there are already FAR more scientific articles than any scientist can read even if they look exclusively at those published in their own language. And the replication crisis is still a thing. But still? It would make it easier to find what you’re looking for if you’re searching for studies on some niche topic. And easy translation might at least make the top-tier, most well-respected scientific journals of other countries more accessible and more widely read. Although perhaps with the handful of expensive top-tier journals I suppose there might already be human-provided translations for those, I don’t actually know.
/jesus I am fucking rambling today. Ah well :)
Edit: ditto for history. Easier historical collaboration between countries would be invaluable. Especially with the number of times I’ve seen an article like “ancient ruins discovered in the Amazon!” where the ‘discovery’ turns out to actually have been a really popular spot with the locals for years, and it’s just that the information that it existed never traveled far enough to reach archeologists. Which touches also on the issue of archeology as it exists, with primarily white and western archeologists traveling to other countries to excavate and study and often abscond with their artifacts, being oftentimes part and parcel of the colonial project, but this comment is long enough.
I’d like to see a return to this, or a return to the media being generally unbiased if not always truthful. Instead I flip between CNN and Fox and try to distil the facts, then research online… tomorrow I’ll do it all over again.
This is still true for the BBC in the UK and all that happens is that anytime the BBC wants to talk about trans issues, they have to also talk about how transphobia is cool, actually.
Fundamentally I find that following media is a fool’s errand. What are you actually learning by doing that, really? I agree that informing oneself on the state of the world and the country is important, but at the end of the day it is impossible to be objective, and even if you and the media were, what good would it be?
I too am sick of both-sides-ism for the same and similar reasons. It’s not the case that each side in every debate is argued in equally good faith, nor that each has equal scientific basis, etc. I think the net effect of a policy like this would just be to entrench the culture of giving any and every blatantly hateful/wrong opposite a legitimizing platform.
Personally, I’d prefer the abandonment of the pretense that media can ever be unbiased, in one way or another. I’d rather media be upfront about its biases, and have journalists be encouraged to try to be as skeptical as possible of their own side (or something like that) while being open about which side is theirs, rather than have “unbiased” and “neutral” news sources, written by people who are humans who therefore do have opinions, that inevitably still do shit like repeatedly post identical transphobic op-eds, or articles with titles like “Locals dismayed over homeless encampment”, and simultaneously claim to be unbiased. That type of title regarding the homeless, as an example, prioritizes the housed locals who are upset (about area cleanliness, sidewalk accessibility, drugs in proximity to their homes, whatever) as being the newsworthy story, and their opinions as being the ones you should take into consideration, rather than prioritizing the fact that a bunch of people - who are also local to that area but not acknowledged/valued as such - are unhoused and living in misery and exposed to temperatures, etc, as being the newsworthy story. Regardless of how you feel about the homeless personally, it’s an article title like that takes a perspective on a situation, privileges one party in the situation over another, but it presents that perspective as ostensibly unbiased and purely factual, and in so doing it just hides its own bias rather than actually eliminating it.
And, in that particular case, I personally believe it encourages the populace as a whole to devalue and dehumanize unsheltered and drug-addicted humans in favor of only caring about whether housed people can see them or not. But if the journalist was able to be upfront with and maybe even explicitly acknowledge their own bias in some standardized way in the article, it might make that bias less invisible and lead people to put more consideration into the matter in general and be less likely to automatically absorb whatever the bias in the article is.
I also just think that truly unbiased, purely factual media is impossible to achieve, and that journalism’s traditional quest to do so is a fool’s errand that historically has not worked out.
I wonder whether/how journalism’s core tenants and cultures might differ between the Anglophone world and other countries in other parts of the world, like South America or Africa. I feel like differences like that could go fairly unnoticed because of the language-barrier - like, how often do Americans or British folks read translated news articles from other languages, and how often do Journalism students in the anglosphere learn about other countries’ home-grown journalistic traditions or methods? I’d be willing to bet the profession of journalism as practiced in the west would tend to almost-exclusively consider only academic articles and philosophies generated by its own cultures and institutions, seeing as that’s how it has tended to go in the sciences and other disciplines.
There have been many separate occasions that some amazing scientific discovery was made in one country, like China or Italy or Greece or wherever, but the anglophone science community didn’t find out about it at all because it wasn’t published in English or in a popular English journal (or, in earlier times, wasn’t talked about amongst anglophone science societies or in scientists’ letters or books). I think I remember reading that Mendel, the Austrian monk who discovered the basics of alleles and the mechanism of genetic variability and inheritance, by way of years upon years of careful and meticulous experiments, went almost entirely unknown as a scientist (until decades after his death, when his work was rediscovered, and when other people discovered the same things independently or replicated his experiments), and that this may have been due in part to the fact that he was Austrian and published and presented only in his language. He also just didn’t do a lot to promote his work, supposedly, but I remember reading that the initial crickets in response to his life’s work rather discouraged him from further promoting it and from further scientific endeavors.
/pardon, several of those paragraphs are a bit run-on and word-salady perhaps, aaaand I’ve gone on several tangents, but I must stop editing this comment now for fear of spending too much time on social media vs the rest of my life.
Replying to my own comment instead of making said comment even longer:
I hope that, for all the problems ChatGPT and co. is introducing to the world, it might sufficiently grease the wheels of translation to make communication between different countries’ scientists and scholars much easier. Imagine if every scientific paper could just be auto-translated, even if imperfectly, well-enough to be easy to read and reasonably understandable, at least enough to indicate where someone might want to dig further.
Granted, this speculation ignores the problem that there are already FAR more scientific articles than any scientist can read even if they look exclusively at those published in their own language. And the replication crisis is still a thing. But still? It would make it easier to find what you’re looking for if you’re searching for studies on some niche topic. And easy translation might at least make the top-tier, most well-respected scientific journals of other countries more accessible and more widely read. Although perhaps with the handful of expensive top-tier journals I suppose there might already be human-provided translations for those, I don’t actually know.
/jesus I am fucking rambling today. Ah well :)
Edit: ditto for history. Easier historical collaboration between countries would be invaluable. Especially with the number of times I’ve seen an article like “ancient ruins discovered in the Amazon!” where the ‘discovery’ turns out to actually have been a really popular spot with the locals for years, and it’s just that the information that it existed never traveled far enough to reach archeologists. Which touches also on the issue of archeology as it exists, with primarily white and western archeologists traveling to other countries to excavate and study and often abscond with their artifacts, being oftentimes part and parcel of the colonial project, but this comment is long enough.
How weird that the BBC never seems to have a republican around when talking about the monarchy.
Reuters is pretty objective I believe