Media bias - who will watch the watchers?
I came across an interesting website, Epsilon Theory. One of their articles covers their Fiat News Index:
... FNI looks through articles for the presence of 10 words we have identified as having a strong relationship with explanations, assumptions or implicit claims of causal links, or words asserting common knowledge or self-evident
Our aim is to provide a rough estimate of how often an outlet’s articles are explaining to readers how to think about a topic. ...
From the February 6, 2019 article, All Along the Watchtower, by Rusty Guinn:
... If the concept of fiat news is new to you, Ben’s original piece here offers the best explanation. In short, it is news which broadly cheapens the credibility of media by presenting opinion as fact. It debases information in the same way that a capricious sovereign might debase a currency. It tells you how to think.
But there is a certain type of fiat news which is the most pernicious, most in need of calling out where it rears its head. It seeks, like all fiat news, to present subjective judgments and opinions as fact....
Yep. I’m talking about Fact Check Journalism....
Using the NPR Fact Check of the 2019 State of the Union Address, the author exposes "fact checks" that are intended to influence the thought process of the reader. Here are a few examples:
Benchmark Switch. It isn’t a fact check so much of a statement against reality, but against what the author believes should have been said. The intention of this kind of fact check is to establish common knowledge about what is conventional and acceptable, to frame your interpretation of the remainder of the speech...
Anecdotal Rebuttals and Emotionally Curated language.... This is an opinion the author wished to express, and found a ‘fact check’ to use as scaffolding for that opinion.
Necessary Context, the selective provision of additional facts to tell you the context in which the original fact should be interpreted. The author doesn’t trust you to know what to do with certain bits of information that imply that the economy has been doing well. You need to know his opinion about whether it has been influenced by certain policies...
You will find more of these if you read the piece, and you’ll find more of them in any such piece, because many news organizations have allowed their so-called fact checking apparatuses to become melded with their editorial, commentary and analysis practices. And that, friends, is the problem. Our trust in media is under attack....
And someone must watch the watchmen.
The entire article is worth reading.
Media Bias, Censorship, and Corporate Political Correctness Run Amuck - a CAIRCO compendium of ongoing bias and censorship.
Related
The Media’s 9 Worst ‘Fact Checks’ of Trump’s State of the Union, by John Nolte, Breitbart, Februaru 6, 2019.