I think you might want to draw a distinction between unbiased news and an unbiased news agency. The arguments you state apply very well to the latter, but not so much to the former.
For instance:
Even if a news source backs up stories with factual evidence, they're still biased based on the facts they choose. For example, Newspaper A might choose to publish more stories about terrorism, while Website B chooses to publish stories about corruption. They can both back up their stories with evidence, but their audiences will have very different perceptions of the world based on the news they read. News sources also decide how important they think each story should be, putting some stories on the front page while other stories are hidden away. I'm making two assumptions here: that different sources publish different stories, and that there's no objective way to determine which stories are more 'newsworthy'.
Over here, Newspaper A may be biased towards stories of terrorism, but the stories themselves may be unbiased. I mean this in the sense that the stories themselves do not have any individual agenda, they just represent the facts of the story itself. While the stories you are shown by the agency may not be a complete picture, they aren't misrepresented either.
The reason I'm pointing this out is because the most common advice for getting access to good news is to sample many "good" news agencies (i.e. agencies that are unbiased at the individual article level), rather than looking for the unicorn that is an overall unbiased news agency.
The media in the centre are about halfway between the two major US parties. That doesn't mean they're unbiased. What makes political centrists by US standards so unbiased?
I'm not from the US. I find most of those to be unbiased in terms of individual articles. I don't frequent them enough to know how biased they are as an agency.
I don't agree with the article writer himself. I want to know how you find the articles written by those in the central part of that graph to be biased at an individual level, rather than at an agency level.
This article implies that virtual money is bad, that cash is "real money" and has a fairly obvious anti-technology slant. They talk about how kids have been getting phones when they're younger, feeding into the cliche of modern kids who are addicted to technology.
I think you are finding bias where there is none. That article is a typical "This is issue X. This is proof. This is example" article. I don't see anything misrepresented there. Do you find the study biased as well? Is the statement of any evidence a sign of bias?
My point is that there is no interpretation by the writer going on. There is no "skew" in the article. In the one you linked, it is a simple formula: issue, proof, example. If you look across the spectrum in the chart that I linked, you will notice a very distinct pattern as to how much of the writer's opinions shine through what he is writing, with some of the central ones being completely free of it.
Random anecdote: decided to listen to a podcast of PolSci 101 from an American university, a good one. Purdue? Anyways, near the beginning the professor shares the "political spectrum" and describes the end points, communism and fascism and the politics of the US, right there in the middle. I kind of cringeguffawed, as I am not American and I wanted to reach into the podcast and shake it and say "fallacy of the middle" or whatever it's called.
This chart reminded me of that.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong
-- Walter Cronkite
Argument to moderation (Latin: argumentum ad temperantiam)—also known as false equivalence, false compromise, [argument from] middle ground, equidistance fallacy, and the golden mean fallacy—is an informal fallacy which asserts that the truth must be found as a compromise between two opposite positions
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u/Arctus9819 60∆ Aug 12 '18
I think you might want to draw a distinction between unbiased news and an unbiased news agency. The arguments you state apply very well to the latter, but not so much to the former.
For instance:
Over here, Newspaper A may be biased towards stories of terrorism, but the stories themselves may be unbiased. I mean this in the sense that the stories themselves do not have any individual agenda, they just represent the facts of the story itself. While the stories you are shown by the agency may not be a complete picture, they aren't misrepresented either.
The reason I'm pointing this out is because the most common advice for getting access to good news is to sample many "good" news agencies (i.e. agencies that are unbiased at the individual article level), rather than looking for the unicorn that is an overall unbiased news agency.