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Originally Posted by j. d. worthington  One of the aspects of such criticism is to detect ways the text manipulates one's response to a thing...Sometimes this is an unconscious bias, sometimes quite deliberate. But the bias is always there. And in the media -- especially when it comes to news reporting -- it is so pervasive that one really has to sift through the way something is reported as well as the "facts" reported, to avoid being influenced by it in either overt or subtle ways. The editorials are seldom any more biased or opinion-based than the actual "reportage" -- they are just more openly so. |
You hit the nail on the head here JD. Again, it boils down to personal responsibility. Even with "journalistic integrity" etc. bias will always come into play, as you said, consciously or unconsciously. It is our personal responsibility to be the eternal skeptic. Not believe the first thing you read, but to try to practice SOME form of objectivity, fact verification, source checking etc.
Newspapers are the prime example of this...every large urban centre usually has more than one newspaper, and it is usually pretty clear what end of the political spectrum they tend to represent. It is our personal responsibility to multi-source, i.e. read both or multiple accounts of the story you are reviewing, try to get to the original text of an interview, or try to do some spot checking of reported fact.
Here comes Heinlein again (I love taking a beating for him):
What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
I fear there are too many of us today that believe "It must be true because I read it somewhere once".