That's news media, not news. The media reports the news, in ways you may dislike, but the actual content they're sharing with you is rooted in literal events that took place.
Well fine, you win the argument over semantics. Everyone here is referring to news media using the term news. Now that we've come to this understanding that what we mean by news is news media then my point stands.
The problem is, the original article itself doesn’t really differentiate. It DOES call out longer form pieces like books or magazines as better alternatives (suggesting the article is primarily referring to news media) but also implies not jumping on the latest story and waiting for those that outlast the news cycle (which would suggest the article is also about “knowing things” in so much as we don’t need to know all things immediately all the time).
I don’t think anyone is making the reductionist argument that “knowing things isn’t worth it”.
But our time and attention is finite, and the things the news media is directing our time and attention toward learning is arguably not valuable.
I would also challenge the notion that news media is nothing but a gateway to raw news with bias that we can account for. Most people don’t account for it, most media outlets don’t account for it, and it may not even be possible for it to truly be accounted for.
News media can and does report incomplete facts that can change an entire perception of an issue. They can and do report non facts as well. Apologies and corrections are rare and buried, usually bookended by the next wrong things to be reported.
If we (a) define news media and news as separate entities entirely, and (b) define news as “something that happened”, then it even furthers the argument that news media itself is unworthy of time and attention, even in seeking news as raw facts. Because news media does such a poor job of reporting facts, the facts end up too mangled to be usable.
At this point the question becomes “can the bias actually be accounted for” (IMO, it cannot be), and if not, “how do we get facts outside of the news media”.
Which is still tangentially related to the original article in so much as we’re still discussing which news (facts) matter and where do you get them from… but in almost no case is the answer “the news media”.
Potentially anyone involved in the making of the report.
Each part of the process, from investigating and gathering facts, writing, and presentation, presents an opportunity for bias to be introduced, be it implicitly or explicitly.
What phrase, if you had to choose one, would you describe the group of people who do this work? The work, as you clearly explain here, is how bias gets introduced?
