There's bias, and then there's this kind of bias (from WP):
MintPress News supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia, Iran, and Syria. In one contentious article, MintPress News asserted that the Ghouta chemical attack in Syria was perpetrated by rebel groups rather than by the Syrian government, a claim pushed by the Russian and Syrian governments and rejected by much of the international community.
In Syria, Obama armed a bunch of "moderates" as he put it. They were all just extremist terrorists. Our media covered for him. Why don't you equally distrust our media?
Because of the former's highly Kool-aidy and ideological slant, and the nonsense conspiracy theories it regularly peddles. You don't notice that stuff?
Everything is biased; the main difference is how good they are at hiding it. Heck, Wikipedia’s cofounder calls it “propaganda” and said the site has “become merely left-wing advocacy essays.”
No, the difference is whether they try to be unbiased or not. Wikipedia used to try, somewhat, occasionally. Now they are indeed "merely left-wing advocacy essays.”
Hardly any news outlets are trying anymore, so I can see why you think that.
Trying to be unbiased is a futile effort, and most journalists know that. What good journalists do is take their inherit bias into account and adjust for it. The reporting should be truthful, and people should know the facts after reading it. Biased media often editorializes the truth so it conveys one message rather then another. This can be bad, or it can be good, it depends on the message. When the message is “a genocidal army is doing a bad thing”, I lean towards this editorializing being good actually.
That seems to be the conventional wisdom. I sometimes get on newspapers.com (not free, unfortunately) for my articles, and for the Pullman Strike series I used the NYT for excerpts. This was 1894-95.
So no, it's not futile; it's just difficult. They were doing it, and that's part of what made them the "newspaper of record" (a rep which they're busy squandering now).
I'll refrain from the shameless self-promotion for a change and not include links, but I posted all of them to HN. Or of course you could use the 7-day free trial on newspapers.com.
As for your last, sentence: no, the adjective "genocidal" is not OK. "Unbiased" would be a description of what the army is doing, with another story "Does this qualify as genocide?" Or quotes from organizations calling it genocide.
Presenting both sides is not the same as being unbiased. The bias materializes in e.g.
a) Giving one side a favorable treatment
b) not presenting the full argument of the other
c) missing the viewpoint of a third, fourth, etc. side
d) when one side is just plain wrong, not presenting it as wrong, but of equal merit.
e) etc.
The bias can be as simple as who you present as the subject in your headline.
As for the Pullman strikes, I don‘t know much about the subject but when the New York Times called it: a struggle between the greatest and most important labor organization and the entire railroad capital. (quote I got from Wikipedia) they were definitely showing a bias, theirs just happened be judged better by history than the rest of the journalistic world at the time who had a different and much worse bias (and as such much more obvious in hindsight).
I would think that unbiased would mean presenting all the pertinent facts.
Nowadays, "bothsideism" is considered a mortal sin in journalism and only the facts that support a particular viewpoint should be transmitted. Any other facts are d/misinformation and should be censored.
Thats not what journalists do (or at least not good ones). Journalists’ job is to contextualize the facts and interpret them in a wider sense.
I’m also not sure this is actually an Edward R. Murrow quote. I went looking but couldn’t find the source. The closes I found was:
> American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.
Which actually place more into what I’m saying, that a good journalist will tell a truthful story with the aim of persuading people of their viewpoint (which hopefully is a worthy one; not e.g. denying a genocide)
The quote you presented I only found one instance of on the web which was here:
> I learned from my first daily newspaper editor, when I was pitching a story about improper personal favors dispensed by local government to a prominent landowner, that my suspicions meant nothing until I could prove it. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you know,” the late Joe Ellis, editor and publisher of the Clarksdale (Mississippi) Press-Register, admonished me.
And even here the context around the quote is advocating for using true stories to persuade the readers of a certain viewpoint, that corrupt politicians are bad actually.
The context here of Mintpress News being a heavily biased journal—which they undoubtedly are—presenting a true story while trying to persuade readers that a genocidal army is doing other bad things. This is good journalism actually.
