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0 pointsbeaconstudios9y ago0 comments

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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ouid9y ago· 2 in thread

I'm not trying to measure bias, the statement that I am challenging is that fox news has been moved to the left by the addition of other sources which are to the right of Fox news. This is only the case if the definition of unbiased is "average".

My reasoning is as follows:

Partisan bias is a type of bias. If there exists a way of presenting information without any bias, then it presents information without partisan bias.

if such a method exists, then we do not need to measure news sources relative to each other in order to talk about what qualifies as non-partisan. This means that partisanship is a static quality of a piece of journalism, i.e. any method you propose of measuring partisanship should always give you the same answer for the same piece of journalism.

If you interpreted fox as having a far right bias in 2004, and don't notice any particular change in their reporting, then you should interpret them as having a far right bias now.

beaconstudiosOP9y ago

but if fox is far right, where does that leave Breitbart? Most would say that Breitbart is more partisan, but you can't just make it "far far right". A scalar with a limit means that as you add new values towards the limit, other values have to shrink towards the root to compensate. Fox was "far right" in 2004 when politics was generally quite centrist, but now that politics has become much more polarised on both sides, fox is still fairly centrist but new, more partisan sources have come along.

Fox's level of partisanship hasn't changed, the environment has, leading Fox's "relative partisanship" to go down.

tropo9y ago

In that time period, the biggest change has been CNN making a dramatic move to the left. They went from near the center to being out with MSNBC, which was already well to the left and moving left.

With that, we lost the closest thing we had to unbiased mainstream media. It's pretty disturbing that Fox is now the least biased.

I miss the old CNN. :-(

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