Biden - Approval

[Dill]

(10-25-2022, 05:26 PM)Nately120 Wrote: Ok, so we're talking like the bare basics "Two dead at so and so street" where the absolute bare minimum without any sort of analysis or commentary is provided.  Ehhh, even then I feel like their main purpose is to lead viewers/readers towards a parent source in regards to things where commentary/spin is the commodity being peddled.

I'm probably being overly cynical, but I just don't see it being anyone's chief duty to inform and provide facts.

Well, reporters are paid to do that. Democracies require informed citizens and transparent government. The job of the free press is to provide for that. 

I share your skepticism of the "bare basics" reporting. I call that the "Dragnet model" and have criticized it elsewhere in the forum.
(# 64 http://thebengalsboard.com/Thread-12-7-Terrorist-attack?pid=1118894&highlight=dragnet#pid1118894.)

There aren't pristine facts over there that  just select themselves and that anyone could see and report "honestly" if he wanted to, and then over here on the other side of the facts just commentary, opinion, and "bias."   To think that invites confirmation bias on the consumer side and manipulation through "facts" on the producer side. "We report, you deicide" is already the motto of one news organization--with questionable results.

I think of reporting much the way I think of doing history. What happened in the U.S. colonies on July 4, 1776? Probably a lot of things. Someone's cow died in Boston, a slave ship set out from Rhode Island. Joe and Jane Doe were married in Charleston, SC. We tend to remember a certain political event, though, not all those other things, because historians selected it for remembering because of its consequences. That is a value judgment and a historical "editorial" decision. Those values are always grounded in some notion of the common good and professional standards.

Reporters have to operate the same way. They report facts they think a free citizenry should know, but there are always many facts and one has to select among them, based on value judgements. There is no selection WITHOUT value judgements, which give reporters, and then editors, a means of prioritizing stories and what "facts" will be in them. Our job is not to "trust" reporters, but to read and compare their accounts with reporting from other vantage points.