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0 pointsouid9y ago0 comments

The center is defined constructively as "news presented in order of significance and without providing commentary". These are objective metrics, though they are very hard to calculate. And while any particular ranking is likely to be subjective, the standard is not.

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tropo9y ago· 3 in thread

The news is infinite though. Inconvenient news could be left out, and that would still meet your standard.

There is also the matter of the English language having numerous ways to express the same thing. Choice of words matters, even if the cold facts don't change. Example: did the cars collide, crash, hit each other, smash into each other, or have an accident? Was the child spanked, swatted, hit, whacked, struck, or paddled?

ouidOP9y ago

I said ordered by significance. If something is left out of my ideally objective news outlet, then it was, by construction, less significant than the things that were included.

To address your second point, connotation is objectively a part of meaning. I did not merely require that this ideally objective news source SEEM objective. It has to actually be objective.

Frankly, the argument you made was that the existence of "farther right wing" media pushed fox towards the center.

All I have to do is demonstrate that there exists an objective presentation of newsworthy facts, even if only in an abstract sense, and then show that fox has not changed its position relative to itself, over time, to show that your argument is false.

Centered does not mean average, when it comes to reporting, it means objective.

beaconstudios9y ago

that doesn't make sense, because if your scale is based on subjectivity vs objectivity, there is no partisan divide. There is just objective journalism approaching one side (approaching, as I don't think any journal could be truly objective without being purely numbers-based) and highly subjective content from any viewpoint approaching the other. That defeats the whole point of reading across the aisle and is more a metric of yellow journalism vs fact reporting. To attempt to split subjectivity onto a left and right wing would be to cause a lot of difficulty determining the limits and whether a report is subjective or objective at a partisan level would inherently be poisoned by the reviewer's own bias.

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tropo9y ago

It's not the existence of "farther right wing" media that puts fox near the center, though that is suggestive. It's the fact that fox more closely aligns with mainstream opinion.

Ah, here, this looks like a story on the study I remember:

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outl...

For your convenience, it links to this:

http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/

http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...

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