The thing I’m really aching for in news media is journalism that rises above merely reporting events. “A guy got murdered yesterday” is not useful information for me. It’s barely even a data point, because I can’t read about ten such events and extrapolate anything meaningful from it. Other things like population size, number of stopped crime, completeness of data etc affect any conclusion that could be drawn from it
In fact I shouldn’t try to extrapolate from it, because I’m paying the journalist to talk to the right experts and hopefully also do research on their own, to figure out trends and cause-effect relationships. That’s meaningful journalism that helps me make decisions such as how to vote.
Media today has so much noise and so little signal. I don’t need a daily newspaper filled to the brim with events. I need perhaps a weekly magazine that I can read on a Sunday morning in half an hour, which teaches me something about what’s going on in the world without bias, and brings up the data as evidence. I wouldn’t mind paying for it and I’d take it on paper, though e-ink would be better. I’d trust it a lot more if ads were not mentioned anywhere in its business model.
without bias, and brings up the data as evidence.
There is no news without bias. You just said you didn’t want a series of events listed as news. Anything extra is opinion. Even the selection of which facts to include is opinion.
You want either a book or a scientific journal. The well researched ones are boring. I promise, you don’t want them:
I don’t believe that. You can’t tell me there’s no difference in the amount of bias between Fox News and AP. Sure, we can’t reach some kind of theoretical 0.0 bias - even particle physics research is biased by assumptions. But at least it makes an honest attempt. Although the conclusions an article arrives at may be influenced by the author’s opinions, a journalist who is honestly trying to avoid bias would provide the reasoning, data and sources behind those opinions instead of simply stating them as fact. That gives me as a reader a chance to evaluate their merits.
You can’t tell me there’s no difference in the amount of bias between Fox News and AP
If you say, “I don’t want hatemongers, propaganda, and misinformation in this publication” that’s still a bias. You’re biased toward facts, inclusion, and accuracy. The choice of what stories to run, what sources to speak to or include, how articles are framed, etc. are all biases, conscious or not. There’s no way for a human to be dispassionate about anything. Even algorithms can’t be dispassionate because they carry the biases of the developers who write them, again, conscious or not. And even at news orgs where you have journalists keen on facts, the org itself is still run by some billionaire capitalists or multinational conglomerates who have intentions that may, overtly or not, drive editorial decisions.
The difference between Fox News and AP e.g. is whether or not they choose to platform mis- and dis-information, and whether they’re happy to tell lies to rile up a mob of angry bigots. Not biased vs. unbiased
A highly curated RSS feed pushed to your eInk device, perhaps?
But yeah, agree 😓