It's not bias that bothers me. Attempts at neutrality can create their own bias-ish issues. Variety and independence is the best help here, IMO. Independence of outlets from one another. Independence of journalistic voices within outlets, etc.
What does bother me is quality, effort even. The majority of high visibility reporting is mostly commentary. Factual accuracy isn't even applicable.
They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc. A good example is the latest G7 meet. Every summary of the underlying tax problems I read was substandard. The speculation about what G7 decisions would mean was substandard.
No one actually understood what they were writing about. They dig just far enough to strike emotional or partisan content: "Apple paid just %X tax, because tax havens, cheating & stuff." Tax is all about details. You have t
The average engaged reader who has read dozens of articles on the topic has not learned anything, besides good guys, bad guys and moral outrages. I don't think the journalists do either. If you want to actually know something about the topic, you need to go to wikipedia or hunt down a good blog article.
> They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc.
Indeed. Many times when I look at the original sources for news articles, the sources either include major pieces of information omitted from the article, or even information that contradicts the article. There's talk about how people on Hacker News/Reddit/Twitter/etc. comment without reading an article, but it looks like most reporting is the same - writing an article without looking at the source.
When you see that neither the reporters nor the consumers of the news seem to care about this, it's clear that the purpose is to entertain and not inform.
Depth isn't all that compelling. A well researched article doesn't get more views. The incentives to do a quick write up are strong. Spend 100 hrs researching a topic, for no gain... or spend 1hr writing an article with just enough content to draw agreement or disagreement.
What does bother me is quality, effort even. The majority of high visibility reporting is mostly commentary. Factual accuracy isn't even applicable.
They don't do the work. I very rarely encounter articles that feel like a journalist has poured over documents, spent hours with experts, etc. A good example is the latest G7 meet. Every summary of the underlying tax problems I read was substandard. The speculation about what G7 decisions would mean was substandard.
No one actually understood what they were writing about. They dig just far enough to strike emotional or partisan content: "Apple paid just %X tax, because tax havens, cheating & stuff." Tax is all about details. You have t
The average engaged reader who has read dozens of articles on the topic has not learned anything, besides good guys, bad guys and moral outrages. I don't think the journalists do either. If you want to actually know something about the topic, you need to go to wikipedia or hunt down a good blog article.