Complex Numbers

Opinions Are Like Assholes

A possibly contentious "JAFBG"  [XGC] prompt...

How do you feel about the integrity of the news? Can we believe what we read/see? How much bias is there?

There is always bias in the news.

I mean always. Some things are actually impossible, and one impossible thing is to be without bias. Even if a news source can be trusted to report only the objective facts of something -- keeping opinion completely out of the text -- they demonstrate some bias in the simple act of deciding what to report on.

You hear the complaint all the time. Like, just yesterday, I found out that coal miners in Alabama are on strike,   and it hasn't been reported in the major news networks.

Well, actually, I only have their word that it's not reported on the major networks. I didn't fact-check that. It doesn't matter enough to me, and besides, it's very hard to prove a negative. But let's assume they're correct at that source, for now (at this point someone else may have picked up the story; again, I don't know). It demonstrates the point: One source finds this to be significant enough to report on, and another doesn't. Why? Who knows? Maybe the large corporations running the major networks (both left-leaning and right-leaning) don't want to give attention to workers' rights. Maybe there's too much else going on to squeeze it in. Maybe they don't want to take the chance of losing major advertisers.

In any case, "this is something They don't want you to know" is itself a biased (and clickbaity) tack to take when reporting on an event.

So, yes, there is always bias in the news. That's not the problem, not if you're aware of it and can ask your own questions.

The problem is that sometimes the news tries too hard to be unbiased.

I know I've harped on this before. For a long time, and it might still be going on, a news story about some new finding in, say, the field of climatology would be reported on like "Here is what scientists say is happening," followed, in some stupid attempt at "fairness," something like, "And now here's Joe-Bob insisting that the drought in the West is perfectly normal."

Those two things are not equivalents. It is as if you report on someone circumnavigating the Earth, and then switch to a flat-earther proclaiming that it couldn't have happened because the Earth isn't round. It would be like if you're doing a report on NASA sending another mission to the moon, and in the interest of presenting "both sides," you cut to someone who claims that no one got there in the first place.

We should not be giving equal time -- or any time, really -- to people devoted to denying the facts.

And that's just facts. Opinions don't have equal weight, either.

Like... take my second-favorite subject, beer. I like several different styles of beer, notably stouts and Belgians; I generally dislike West Coast IPAs and I utterly despise mass-produced watered-down piss such as Coors Light and Buttwiper. That is an opinion, and it is mine. Other people really enjoy West Coast IPAs and dislike Belgians. Some people even like Coors Light, or they wouldn't keep selling that crap. Yes, I have strong opinions about it. But my opinion is no more "true" than yours or his or hers or theirs, because what beer someone likes (or even if they enjoy the delicious amber nectar) is a matter of taste. And susceptibility to marketing strategies, but still, people like what they like.

In matters of taste, your opinion is right for you and mine is right for me. We might influence each other, but neither of us is objectively right.

But -- and I'm going to borrow from a comic I once saw -- say you're a passenger on an airplane. You may have an opinion of how the plane should be flown. But you're not a trained pilot. The actual pilot also has an opinion on how the plane should be flown. She or he, in that case, has a better opinion than you do.

They could still be wrong -- sometimes planes crash due to operator error -- but they have a much, much lower chance of being wrong than you do.

Opinions are like assholes: Everyone has one, and most of them stink.

Since a lot of journalists seem to have forgotten this hierarchy of opinion, giving apparently equal weight to evidence-based opinions and ignorant opinions, it's up to us to discern who we should believe when they make a statement about, for example, public health.

And obviously, as a group, we're completely incapable of doing that.

Which sucks. In my opinion.