If this image is too big for your Fediverse client, my apologies, you can read the comic at https://thebad.website/comic/neutral_news
[a newscaster sits at their desk, has a gigantic grin on his face, barely looks human]
Good evening, welcome to NEUTRAL NEWS
Your favorite mainstream program that always brings you a balanced perspective
Tonight’s top story: Some say a genocide is happening, others say it’s a complicated situation
[destroyed buildings, smoke, a crashed car, things look real bleak]
LIVE FROM THE CITY OF GENOCIDEBURG
[split screen, the newscaster continues talking]
A government spokesperson from Genocideland contacted us to clarify that the images you are seeing now might be, I quote, “faked by antigenociders who want us dead”
[in the rubble of a destroyed city, a character looks absolutely desperate, shaking, is screaming]
THEY KILLED MY ENTIRE FAMILY
[split screen, the newscaster smiles smugly]
Thank you for your perspective
[a character in a suit talks, looking very smug]
We reject the premise that there was any killing or destruction
[split screen, the newscaster still smiles smugly]
A bold alternative narrative, worthy of consideration!
[the newscaster is back to the full face inhuman smile, standing next to a chart that shows a BALANCE between TRUTH and FEELINGS]
As always, we at NEUTRAL NEWS aim to meet in the middle
[three identical stern technocrat looking characters in suits are standing at a desk, behind a chart that goes up]
We need to wait for more data before reacting
Let us not get carried away by the emotional responses
It’s a very complex topic
[two banners occupy the bottom part of the screen, below the experts]
DEATH COUNT: VERY HIGH AND GOING UP
Our expert panel says: this could mean anything
[in a destroyed city, in front of an explosion, a character wearing a PRESS helmet talks into a mic]
IT’S COMPLETE CHAOS OUT HERE, I HEARD EXPLOSIONS
[below the war reporter, the bottom half of the screen is occupied by two banners]
UNVERIFIED CLAIMS
We remind you that our experts in the studio say this is still a developing, nuanced situation
[split screen, the newscaster is mildly smiling at the war reporter]
Remember to take everything you see with a grain of salt!
[back to the newscaster at their desk, once again with the creepy full smile]
This was NEUTRAL NEWS presented to you by our sponsor Neutral Milk
Tired of extremes? Try Neutral Milk! Now with 50% less nutrients!
we see this news source is anti war, therefore we dock their actuality score because they are so anti war - - media bias fact check on Dropsite News
Move the slider completely over to feelings and you have most US news in a nutshell. There may be some facts, but it is really about the feels.
its mostly propaganda, especially now that its owned conservatives. telltale signs is having copaganda, and military propaganda on it.
Yes I’m seeing a propensity for people to get stuck on one end of this spectrum or the other, and it seems to be good at inhibiting judgement or leading to some extremist belief. And unable to separate historical events from current ones and appropriate reactions therein, poisoning any dispassionate or rational discussion. This is a good example: https://lemmy.world/post/41392385?scrollToComments=true
I think it is challenging not judging history through a modern lense. I am definitely guilty of examining the “founding fathers” through this modern lense and coming to conclusions that weren’t possible for them at the time.
I had a very concerning conversation with an individual I respect very much, yesterday. He is actively striving to remain unflustered by all of this by underplaying the significance of what is happening. He thinks Trump is just being a blowhard and will be stopped short of economic stability collapsing. He didn’t have a response when I asked if maybe that was too late to act.
did you also say mention bush wasnt stopped when the recession hit in 08
Can we get live satellite video of the site? That might bypass untrustworthy news sources. Unless AI fakery of course.
Unfortunately, the Genocideland government made that illegal, punishable by summary execution.
For threadiverse, it’s “nuance.”
The point of news should has always been and should always be to report things as they are to the public. Their legitimacy should stem from them being accurate, neutral, and nuanced. Their ultimate goal should be to provide to provide all the relative facts and perspectives and let the audience decide for themselves. That’s the ideal standard every news agency worth it’s salt should strive for.
What this meme is criticizing sounds good on the surface, but in reality what’s being advocated for will always evolve to turn into what the US news landscape is now, and that’s something that should be avoided at all costs.
The comic is more what happened with brexit as well. 2 options, so we should have one person from each side represent them in discussions, right? Except this misrepresented the balance of expert opinions which was very heavily skewed towards remain, instead implying it’s about even.
It’s a hard topic to solve, but much like compromise doesn’t mean “just take the middle of the most extreme opinions”, fair news coverage doesn’t mean “present every extreme viewpoint as equally valid when the actual sentiment is clearly biased to one side”. In this case maybe limit it to “the israeli government denied it being a genocide” once or sth.
Their ultimate goal should be to provide to provide all the relative
Relevant?
Fairness does not imply false balance, which this comic is criticizing. However, I think the criticism is a bit late, since the false balance was far worse in previous decades, and journalists nowadays are comfortable calling out obvious falsehoods by presenting conclusive evidence when it exists and they understand it. PBS follows a fairness standard that attempts to avoid false balance:
If one statement is backed by evidence and one is not, fairness requires communicating that to the audience.
A caveat is that journalists often don’t understand conclusive evidence, because they’re not competent enough on the matter they’re reporting to identify relevant facts, so in a rush to report while attempting to avoid bias, they’ll end up with false balance that equally reports all sides & misses relevant, conclusive information.
This meme isn’t anywhere close to neutral though, its criticizing policies such as the fairness doctrine where 1 random nutjob who barely made it through high school is given equal weight to decades of research or whole international regulatory bodies.
But that’s a matter of quality standards rather than the delivery. News agencies should have standards that require all perspectives shown to be from people with some sort of relevant qualification. That way you get rando lunatics, while still adhering to the fairness principle.
Are there “accurate, neutral, and nuanced” news organizations that “report things as they are”?
In a pure sense? No. However, there are some that are closer to this ideal standard than others. For example, AP and Reuters are infinitely better than Fox News or Aljazeera.
Lol, this is Groundnews in a nutshell.
What the hell are you talking about? Ground News is not a news agency, they’re a platform that show media bias in headlines and stories. It’s literally the opposite of this.
I read on the skeptic subreddit that Ground News have to include badly AI translated articles from foreign countries to give a balanced view on stories with obvious bad and good sides
So according to their website, they use over 50,000 sources and that list is expanding. They also don’t calculate bias or factuality rating themselves. They use 3 up with their bias and factuality rating themselves. They use the ratings of 3 third party orgs for that (AllSides, AdFontes Media, and Media Bias Fact Check) and use the average score for their own rating system.
Basically, Ground News is a news aggregator that scrapes all the every news publication it could, categorizes them by bias based on the averaged bias score they got from the 3 orgs mentioned before, organize the stories by topic, measure the coverage, and display them on their site/app/social media. The value of their product is that users get a streamlined place to read their news in one place with bias ratings that are packaged in a visually appealing way.
So do they use AI translation? Most likely since they scrape and parse through an insane volume of articles daily. It’ll be way too expensive and time consuming to use human translators at that scale. That being said, the AI translation doesn’t seem to affect the bias rating or the inclusion of the sources, the translations only exists to make foreign sources readable to their largely English speaking userbase.
Isn’t this the opposite of ground news?
I mean, this is more the BBC who have a penchant for broadcasting nutjob views in the name of impartiality
Ground news is an aggregator that informs you of what kind of slant you’ll get for any given outlet, it definitely doesn’t publish any of its own news. The point of it is to make sure you are aware of how outlets you don’t read are reporting on a given issue. Frankly the main use of that for me is knowing what nonsense my right-wing relatives are gonna otherwise blindside me with at family gatherings.
Now you can, however, definitely bemoan the fact that one of their bias data sources is notoriously biased itself though (Media bias fact check, which equates respectable centrist paper, the guardian, as equivalent in factuality to Breitbart, the literal nazi outlet).
Ground news just kinda says “here’s what everyone is saying about a given topic”, not that all views are equal.
