News doesn’t need to provide context. It’s possible to remove words like unprovoked from the reporting and just list the facts. We don’t hear that neutral point of view because it makes things boring.
That said, push any ideology far enough and they all start to disagree with objective reality. That doesn’t mean accurate information is somehow slanted or facts are somehow political because objective reality doesn’t care, it just is. If every day you list the ~9,250 Americans that died yesterday you’re going to cover mostly natural causes but also plenty of hot button issues for both sides of the isle.
There is insufficient time to list every fact from every event. The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.
Ideally, the goal would be to minimize bias, however I see the opposite many times, and I see it actually as a result of reduced revenue for people that make news.
We, the public at large, responded to information that evokes emotion (especially outrage). We rewarded it with clicks, translating into money for the people that collect and curate it for us. And that is what we get now. We get information, that has been compressed, and while factual many times, it is without the necessary context to come to an appropriate conclusion.
I think the antidote to this might be consumers rewarding publishers and journalists that wait before publishing. They wait so that there is time for the relevant facts to be gathered, there is time for the editors and journalists to write and edit properly. And, to still keep in mind, that it is still insanely difficult to provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion. As one should know if they have ever read an article about a field they are intimately familiar with and have spent thousands of hours in.
> There is insufficient time to list every fact from every event.
Facts relating to events aren’t news their just facts.
> The distillation of facts down to what is and is not relevant itself will introduce some level of bias.
You can come up with the threshold for what’s news long before individual stories show up. It’s filtering based on political context that’s the problem not simply filtering. Aka, decide ahead of time that a president being impeached is news that’s fine. However, if your coverage depends on their party affiliation that’s a problem.
> provide all of the context needed about a situation to have an inexperienced person come to a proper conclusion.
I don’t see why people need to be making conclusions from the news. A Twitter account tweeting any earthquake over 7.0 is fine on it’s own.
If the news is that three people died in a shooting, would you not be better informed by knowing the context that they were drug dealers in a conflict over territory?
Personally I would prefer reporters to stick with known accurate information rather than what whoever they spoke with believed to be accurate context. Shootouts between drug dealers could be over territory, or just about anything else. Unless they spoke with the people actually involved it’s all supposition.
I don't think that it is difficult to determine the scope of the violence, eg: 'gang on gang' compared to 'an angry mentally ill person shooting random people'... which is typically peoples main concern, and you can explain that in a matter of seconds.
It seems like the lack of context gets used to skew peoples perception of an issue just as often as false information, for example classifying gang violence and robberies as "mass shootings" without giving any other details. This can be applied to just about any topic out there. It's easier to leave out details and use esoteric language, than it is to lie about what happened. People can at-least deduce bias/flaws given enough narrative, and a track record of inaccurate context damages an organization's reputation.
The root issue is I don’t want reporters to guess and report what something probably is. Flight 123 an Airbus XYZ crashed at on takeoff from location Z. Fine that’s all verifiable, what the cause was isn’t known don’t even guess you’re just wasting my time.
Most shootings that look like ‘gang in gang’ are probably ‘gang on gang’ violence. But, that doesn’t mean a specific shooting was actually ‘gang on gang’ violence. Gang members also shoot people for personal reasons unrelated to being a gang member. And they also get shot for reasons unrelated to being a gang member. If the assumption is it’s always ‘gang in gang’ and it’s always reported as such then that’s a lot of biased and often incorrect information being reported as fact.
It’s not uncommon for gang members to just go out and randomly shoot stuff the same way young rednecks shoot at road signs. The difference is gang members in cites are vastly more likely to randomly hit someone due to population density.
That said, push any ideology far enough and they all start to disagree with objective reality. That doesn’t mean accurate information is somehow slanted or facts are somehow political because objective reality doesn’t care, it just is. If every day you list the ~9,250 Americans that died yesterday you’re going to cover mostly natural causes but also plenty of hot button issues for both sides of the isle.