> If Jimmy Allred says it’s raining, and W. Lee O’Daniel says it isn’t raining, Texas newspapermen quote them both, and don’t look out the window to see which is lying, and to tell the readers what the truth is at the moment.
If an AI tool, or for that matter a meddling editor, says a headline is "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration", the correct response is "yes, that was the idea".
I don't think most reporting bias takes the form of incorrect facts. It takes the form of picking which facts to share driven by the facts that matter the most to the particular reporter sharing them. This results in slanted coverage even if technically it's "factual".
That as well as the words and tone that are used to describe things and the context surrounding those things. A headline that is neither negative nor positive is not strictly unbiased because it implies that the thing being reported is not very unusual. If it is unusual, then the neutral tone is communicating a bias that this unusual thing should not be regarded as such.
Take a look at the headline flagged in the article, which the tool flagged as "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration". The headline is factually accurate, and the facts are not cherry-picked.
Yes, some reporting is biased. But some reporting is simply accurately reporting damaging information, and "biased" is a way of attacking that without addressing the substance of the problem.
I agree that article's headline is pretty factual nor are the facts cherry-picked. But "some reporting is biased" is heavily understating the problem. And I hypothesize that the reason there is a leap to "This is biased" today on reporting is because the news media organizations have participated in the cherry-picked facts case to enough of a degree that trust has eroded.
Which is perhaps why organizations are searching for ways to not appear biased and begin to restore that trust. I think the reason the LLM approach is likely to fail is because it is unable to detect the "missing facts" case and can only really advise about sentiment and phrasing. Which is not I think the actual problem that needs fixing.
I agree that an AI is unlikely to help. But also, I doubt that the primary reason is "restoring trust". I think the primary reason for many of them is that some of their readers react strongly to things they don't want to hear, and they're afraid of losing customers, so they're watering down their reporting to avoid being inconveniently right.
Or, even less charitably, management and employees have different politics, and management are the ones who find the articles inconvenient.
To be clear, there are absolutely biased news sources out there. For many of them, the bias is the point, and they have no particular desire to "restore trust" because they're already trusted by people who only want to read things supportive of their party. But a politician who finds the truth inconvenient will decry everything accurate as biased.
The factual accuracy of a statement does not have any bearing on the bias or agenda of the person making the statement.
I have seen many documentaries that contain only facts and real events, but nevertheless are pushing a heavily biased agenda. Which facts we report and which we highlight and how we frame them tells a story.
Most of the examples are correct decisions by the model. The headline is the most arguable, the rest are pretty clearly improvements, at least to people who actually want unbiased journalism. And as the article is itself highly biased, written in an antagonistic tone that takes the side of the journalists, we must assume they picked the worst examples they could find. So nearly all of them being clearly correct implies the model is doing a great job overall. Given the evidence presented here, it's not surprising that Law360 is mandating journalists accept the edits.
For example: "the bias indicator flagged a line that said the suit spotlighted challenges with ableism and sexism in the healthcare industry. This copy was flagged because it “frames the lawsuit as a representative example of systemic issues.” Instead, the bias indicator said the story should “state the facts of the lawsuit without suggesting its broader implications.”
The model made the right decision. That's the kind of language that makes people distrust journalists: a passive voice assertion of a radical belief, which adds nothing to the story and isn't supported by any evidence. It doesn't belong in a professionally written report.
And yet we read, "that edit is at odds with any attempt to deliver legal analysis. In most cases, reporters chose not to accept these edits, but they were still required to go through the motions."
Claiming the healthcare system is challenged by "ableism" isn't legal analysis, that's pure politics. But more importantly it's also just absurd. Of course people who work in healthcare want people to be "able". Why would you become a surgeon if you thought disability and sickness was fine? No surprise their bosses are placing the LLM's judgement over that of their own employees, when the journalists have gone so far off the rails. The union should be careful of picking a fight over this because frankly the next step is to just automate away the journalists entirely.
That's why "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is so important. Yet we don't even enforce the limited perjury laws we have.
The common "must present both sides" approach can fail the "nothing but the truth" criterion. But even with its many errors, it's better than not trying anything at all.
Yeah the BBC suffers badly from this problem, because they are required by Ofcom to have fair and "balanced" reporting, and they interpret that as meaning they always have to get one view from each side of a story. Doesn't matter how batshit or fringe a side is, they'll present them equally.
The other day actually, I saw a newscaster describe the horrors Apartheid in South Africa as though it were happening today. She then closed with "... [Apartheid] is now no longer enforced" and transitioned quickly to the next topic. Not ended or abolished, but merely "not enforced".
> Like when the BBC said all converts to Islam are "reverts"
They didn't. They used their interviewees' own preferred terminology to refer to them in the story, which is fine. "Reverts" is the most common term among Muslims. Sort of like how capitalizing God in a story about Christians doesn't invalidate the beliefs of people who worship multiple gods.
> Or when the BBC framed an Ad as racist
The first line: "Scottish Labour has described [...]".
> Or when the BBC framed an Ad as racist, because it called out a politician's sectarian & anti-LGBTQ appeals
This is an insane characterisation of that article, which seems fair to me and not at all what I was talking about. Wanting your race to be represented in politics is a perfectly reasonable view and it doesn't need "calling out".
You should watch the original video, not just the BBC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kucaq6jkHMg . The reddit thread and other articles also provide context that the BBC article glossed over & excluded.
The way I see it: a politician was intimating to a community, known for its conservative religious practices, that they can one day enforce their ideal in their children's education. If the dogwhistle is too quiet, consider how Muslims, Christians and other non-racial communities drove the US Supreme Court ruling to allow opt-out of LGBTQ education.
IMHO, the insane idea is "a community is a race". As if South Asians getting more votes translates directly to "representing their race", not their culture or religion. It's a similar kind of crazy to "Islamophobia is basically racism" which the UK government has been trying to legislate: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2588955/amp
Obviously there are biased antisemitic news organizations, but of the high-profile ostensibly neutral ones BBC stands head and shoulders above the rest in the level of antisemitism.
(You don't have to take my word for it - a quick Google will find huge numbers of examples. Usually they'll get criticized and then post a correction, so in some sense they themselves acknowledge the problem - yet it keeps happening.)
You're happy to redefine genocide in a ludicrously expansive fashion but pretend to need clarification about what antisemitic means in this context? I know, you're just asking questions.
"Semitic" is a word that includes both hebrews and arabs, because both are classified as descendants of Shem in the Bible.
Despite that, most people who use the word "antisemitic" apply it only to something that is done against hebrews, and not to something done against arabs.
Therefore it makes sense to request clarification about what someone means by that word, i.e. if they meant that BBC is anti-Israel or it is anti-arabs.
It would be much better if everyone who means that something is anti-Israeli, would say it clearly, instead of using the ambiguous word "antisemitic".
The word "Semitic" has been created due to a misunderstanding of the Bible, because there the classification of the people was not based on real descendance from common ancestors, but it was based on the political dependence of those people at the time when the Book of Genesis was written. Unfortunately, nobody has found a suitable replacement for this word.
(In the Bible, the descendants of Shem were those dominated by Assyro-Babylonia, while the descendants of Ham were those dominated by Egypt, regardless of their true ancestors. For instance the Phoenicians were classified as descendants of Ham and the Hebrews as descendants of Shem, despite being 2 extremely closely related populations, separated by little else except their different religions.)
Meanwhile in the pro-Palestine movement, the BBC is seen as being so pro-Israel some people think their editors should be prosecuted[1]! (for what, I am unclear on)
112 BBC journalists recently signed an open letter accusing the BBC of pro-Israel bias[2].
Domestically, every single political movement feels the BBC is biased against them. Their dry reporting style is at odds with what many, especially Americans, are used to. Unlike the author of that blogpost I do not really have a problem with them not using the word 'genocide' but I do take issue with some of their selective reporting (of course, every outlet must make a selection and everyone will have a problem with it). For example, Israeli newpaper Haaretz has been doing a lot of reporting on IDF soldiers being ordered to fire on crowds of unarmed civilians at aid sites[3]. The BBC does acknowledge it, but it's buried behind a headline about the IDF starting an investigation[4]. They do this because they always prefer quotes from official sources to eyewitness stuff.
Outright lies are very ineffective in manipulating public opinion because they can be easily disproven.
It's much more about pretending its only a little rain when its raining alot. Ignoring the rain when it doesnt support your narrative. Pretending the rain is really important when its not important at all. Pretending it only rains where you are and much less everywhere else etc etc etc.
Have you looked at American politics recently? The current administration creates huge lies daily, and most of the media relays them uncritically. It's a level of shamelessness previously reserved for countries like Russia.
What is? Can you seriously claim that Trump and his administration are acting more truthfully than Biden's? Don't be stupid.
Just look at what happened in Iran, it's a shitfest of constantly changing narratives, going from warmongerism to peace claims. Lying about what they did and wether it was successful. Lying about wether Israel is on board with making peace.
If “the administration” is The Good Party, the action is “groundbreaking” and “landmark.” If the administration is The Bad Man, the action is “unprecedented.” This is how you frame things to maximize the propaganda effect and scare/please the audience, while maintaining plausible deniability that you’re definitely not pushing an agenda.
(If my comment offends you, I assure you, don’t worry, your party is definitely the Good Party in this scenario.)
I'm well aware of how spin works. However, that doesn't mean that such characterizarions are always wrong. One of the severe problems in current politics is that reporting that looks bad for a particular party will always be characterized as biased, whether the reporting is accurate or not.
Today, somewhere in the world, some people made an event occur. Some people approved and some people disapproved. It impacted some people more than others, which some people think may be a bad thing, although others think that it may have been a good thing. The event stemmed from many past events, which many people have various strong opinions about. Politicians made various strong statements about the event, as well as a few celebrities. The future impact of the event is under debate, though experts agree that the situation is complicated and people should probably think about it very carefully before coming to conclusions. It is unclear what the market will do in response to this event.
General Sherman Begins Demolition in Georgia For Urgently Needed Infrastructure Projects
I mean, you could ask ChatGPT or something to make some pretty braindead impartial newspaper headlines about, like, the Holocaust or slavery. I guess you're right, in some cases, impartiality will come off as a bit ridiculous to the common sense segment of society.
The problem with trying too hard to neutrally report both sides of a story is that's not unbiased either, it's just biased in favour of the side that can lie the most convincingly.
It's a rare issue that you can't swing both ways by selecting the subset of facts to focus on. Attention doesn't just matter, it's all that matters. This is why adversarial forums are so important even if they so often degenerate into shouting past one another: each side has the ability and motivation to bring its strongest facts, so they are at least present in the discussion, even if debate tactics add tons of noise and confirmation bias dampens the effects.
Yes, in principle, but I object to "reporters" merely quoting people instead of attempting to actually verify if what they said has any basis in reality.
That being said, I'm not sure how much this actually matters, trump seems to pretty comprehensively prove that people would rather hear lies, even if they know they are lies.
Nearly all political issues are rooted in philosophical differences of opinion. "The facts" are merely the icing on the cake that various factions use to lure people to their ideology. Factual reporting is better than direct opinion reporting, but both are inherently interpreted by people in the context of the Overton window.
You're not wrong, but very often those philosophical differences are being masked by lies.
I don't want to get into the gory details in this tiny text box, but any number of current fear based political campaigns use wildly "distorted" facts to bolster their arguments, and most of the time reporters just blindly repeat whatever the person says without attempting to verify it.
It's also naturally biased in favor of whoever is more extreme. It's like trying to balance a scale so you place both items on the scale... but one is a rock and the other is a feather.
> Several sentences in the story were flagged as biased, including this one: "It’s the first time in 60 years that a president has mobilized a state’s National Guard without receiving a request to do so from the state’s governor." According to the bias indicator, this sentence is "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration." It was best to give more context to “balance the tone."
"Might subtly critique"?! This isn't protecting versus bias, this isn't even charitably regardable as cowardice.
It's an attack on reason & reporting. To shield the worst cry bullies & offenders. It's ghastly how basic simple reporting so offends, that the public interest is sabotaged by these foes. We face such a need to improve the media, and this is the opposite path, of craven blunt un-intelligently intermediated corporatism.
I said to a colleague the other day that Law360’s reporting seems to be more tortuous and weird than usual. I wonder if this is why.
There was one piece on a case I’ve been following quite closely where I was genuinely unable to make sense of what had happened from the Law360 report without sitting down and spelling my way through it.
More people should really read Baudrillard. Objectivity and language don't combine very well. Show me a person who wants the facts and I'll show you someone who is easily manipulated.
"Bias" and "narrative" have become meaningless words that people use when encountering ideas they don't like. Or when they believe that neither side could ever be right about an issue, that it's virtuous for a stance to be in the middle of the current Overton window.
Even presenting a given problem as "merely" two-sided is often disingenuous.
For instance, if you "just" look at abortion, trans rights, and immigration, you may assume the two parties in america present diametrically-opposed groups of people (...which is even itself quite debatable). But this is only because the two parties don't differ much (or at least, don't bother to platform enough to evaluate) on most topics politics could be about.
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to presume that more valid positions are likely to be found closer to the midpoint of the current Overton window. I suspect that as a matter of Bayesian probability, more extreme positions are more likely to be wrong.
The whole premise of the Overton window is that it does not represent the full spectrum of opinions on some issues, which is unchanging, but rather some socially constructed window onto that spectrum, which does change. Assuming that the midpoint is probably correct is equivalent to saying that any change from the status quo is probably bad. Is that what you really mean?
Based on a gander at history, I doubt it. Usually one side is actually right and it seems very obvious now but was not obvious at the time. And, typically, the moderate or midpoint position seem incredibly stupid now. Like the 3/5ths compromise.
While I'd favor defining words rather than claiming they're meaningless, those aren't accurate definitions.
"Narrative" in this context is more like "attempting to steer the current discourse by making connections among things and positioning them as part of a coherent story", which can be positive (if the result is accurate and reasonable and helps people better understand what's going on) or negative (if it's spin or manufacturing consent). It's "narrative" to say "you should be afraid of X, it's the cause of all your problems". It's also "narrative" to say "here are the five different things we're currently doing to improve Y, and how they tie together into a coherent picture".
Also, bias would be easier to deal with if it were always "lying", or if it advanced a coherent position. It's much broader than that.
LLMs and ML algorithms are beginning to influence the entire lifecycle of articles: researching, writing, editing, publication, discovery (TikTok), and consumption (ChatGPT summarize this). With the few big players, it could be the same model involved at every step. It's scary how a small change to a system prompt could subtly influence things across the board and guide popular opinion.
This creates an infinite regress problem - bias detection systems are themselves trained on data reflecting human judgments about what constitutes "bias."
That's the nice thing. You don't. The conceit of centrism/Liberalism is that extreme voices cancel out. Just ingest a large enough corpus and the central limit theorum takes care of the rest.
Let's say a media outlet, like a newspaper, commits to common journalism best practices, such as neutrality. In my opinion, this does not mean avoiding certain words; it means presenting different perspectives on a topic based on evidence.
Besides that, if someone writes an Op-Ed or commentary, the author expresses their personal opinion. How does this work with this AI thingy? Currently it looks like plain censorship, isn't it?
And why should I buy a newspaper that does not represent my political or personal opinion? I thought that was how it worked.
well, in this particular example I think the answer is straightforward: it's just an ad so it doesn't matter.
This is a marketing/sales piece for LexisNexis by their marketing agency as they try to sell AI services to their customers (law firms and other legal professions). It gives them a news article to share with their customers and tell them something like "see, we're taking the AI plunge. You should too. We offer a bunch of legal AI services, lets talk". Now their CEO and sales people can keep saying "I'm sure you've seen the news about Law360. We think AI is finally ready for legal tasks. You know, as an assistant."
In reality, they are probably to run the article, look at what the AI says and shrug and move on.
To me, a newsroom's bias IS its value. If you let me know your values, I can actually interpret what you're saying. It's the pretense of impartiality that makes me distrust someone.
It's because the executives don't trust the journalists to do the work properly.
The article says that explicitly: customers have complained about the quality of the work. The business owners view unhappy customers as a threat to their business, and so have introduced automation to make product quality higher and more even. The workers are unhappy because they don't want to be automated away and resent the implication that their artisanally hand-crafted articles aren't good enough. This is a very old story that's been going on for hundreds of years. There's nothing special about it.
I don't know how you read this article and came away that they were merely trying to force adoption of AI tools.
This is LexisNexis requiring all of their workers run their output through a censorship machine to comply with the whims of the current administration. It has zero benefits to the workers so of course they have to mandate it
Timeless quote:
> If Jimmy Allred says it’s raining, and W. Lee O’Daniel says it isn’t raining, Texas newspapermen quote them both, and don’t look out the window to see which is lying, and to tell the readers what the truth is at the moment.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2023/11/14/rain-look/
If an AI tool, or for that matter a meddling editor, says a headline is "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration", the correct response is "yes, that was the idea".
I don't think most reporting bias takes the form of incorrect facts. It takes the form of picking which facts to share driven by the facts that matter the most to the particular reporter sharing them. This results in slanted coverage even if technically it's "factual".
That as well as the words and tone that are used to describe things and the context surrounding those things. A headline that is neither negative nor positive is not strictly unbiased because it implies that the thing being reported is not very unusual. If it is unusual, then the neutral tone is communicating a bias that this unusual thing should not be regarded as such.
“... by definition, news is something that almost never happens.”
- Bruce Schneier
Except for the annual “health system in crisis” story.
Edit: substitute any issue you care to name for “health system”, there’s always a crisis that can be used to grab eyeballs.
Take a look at the headline flagged in the article, which the tool flagged as "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration". The headline is factually accurate, and the facts are not cherry-picked.
Yes, some reporting is biased. But some reporting is simply accurately reporting damaging information, and "biased" is a way of attacking that without addressing the substance of the problem.
I agree that article's headline is pretty factual nor are the facts cherry-picked. But "some reporting is biased" is heavily understating the problem. And I hypothesize that the reason there is a leap to "This is biased" today on reporting is because the news media organizations have participated in the cherry-picked facts case to enough of a degree that trust has eroded.
Which is perhaps why organizations are searching for ways to not appear biased and begin to restore that trust. I think the reason the LLM approach is likely to fail is because it is unable to detect the "missing facts" case and can only really advise about sentiment and phrasing. Which is not I think the actual problem that needs fixing.
I agree that an AI is unlikely to help. But also, I doubt that the primary reason is "restoring trust". I think the primary reason for many of them is that some of their readers react strongly to things they don't want to hear, and they're afraid of losing customers, so they're watering down their reporting to avoid being inconveniently right.
Or, even less charitably, management and employees have different politics, and management are the ones who find the articles inconvenient.
To be clear, there are absolutely biased news sources out there. For many of them, the bias is the point, and they have no particular desire to "restore trust" because they're already trusted by people who only want to read things supportive of their party. But a politician who finds the truth inconvenient will decry everything accurate as biased.
The factual accuracy of a statement does not have any bearing on the bias or agenda of the person making the statement.
I have seen many documentaries that contain only facts and real events, but nevertheless are pushing a heavily biased agenda. Which facts we report and which we highlight and how we frame them tells a story.
How could an LLM even decide whether facts are presented in a balanced way? Someone at Law360 seems to believe in a magical oracle.
Most of the examples are correct decisions by the model. The headline is the most arguable, the rest are pretty clearly improvements, at least to people who actually want unbiased journalism. And as the article is itself highly biased, written in an antagonistic tone that takes the side of the journalists, we must assume they picked the worst examples they could find. So nearly all of them being clearly correct implies the model is doing a great job overall. Given the evidence presented here, it's not surprising that Law360 is mandating journalists accept the edits.
For example: "the bias indicator flagged a line that said the suit spotlighted challenges with ableism and sexism in the healthcare industry. This copy was flagged because it “frames the lawsuit as a representative example of systemic issues.” Instead, the bias indicator said the story should “state the facts of the lawsuit without suggesting its broader implications.”
The model made the right decision. That's the kind of language that makes people distrust journalists: a passive voice assertion of a radical belief, which adds nothing to the story and isn't supported by any evidence. It doesn't belong in a professionally written report.
And yet we read, "that edit is at odds with any attempt to deliver legal analysis. In most cases, reporters chose not to accept these edits, but they were still required to go through the motions."
Claiming the healthcare system is challenged by "ableism" isn't legal analysis, that's pure politics. But more importantly it's also just absurd. Of course people who work in healthcare want people to be "able". Why would you become a surgeon if you thought disability and sickness was fine? No surprise their bosses are placing the LLM's judgement over that of their own employees, when the journalists have gone so far off the rails. The union should be careful of picking a fight over this because frankly the next step is to just automate away the journalists entirely.
That's why "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" is so important. Yet we don't even enforce the limited perjury laws we have.
The common "must present both sides" approach can fail the "nothing but the truth" criterion. But even with its many errors, it's better than not trying anything at all.
"slanted", isn't that a form of biasness? #headduck
Yeah the BBC suffers badly from this problem, because they are required by Ofcom to have fair and "balanced" reporting, and they interpret that as meaning they always have to get one view from each side of a story. Doesn't matter how batshit or fringe a side is, they'll present them equally.
You might have seen different BBC stories than I have.
Like when the BBC said all converts to Islam are "reverts"; https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-did-the-bbc-say-musl... ; the nasty implication being that one religion is the status quo of humanity
Or when the BBC framed an Ad as racist, because it called out a politician's sectarian & anti-LGBTQ appeals https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yg0g18989o https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1ksv0y7/refo...
The other day actually, I saw a newscaster describe the horrors Apartheid in South Africa as though it were happening today. She then closed with "... [Apartheid] is now no longer enforced" and transitioned quickly to the next topic. Not ended or abolished, but merely "not enforced".
Their bias is rather pernicious.
> Like when the BBC said all converts to Islam are "reverts"
They didn't. They used their interviewees' own preferred terminology to refer to them in the story, which is fine. "Reverts" is the most common term among Muslims. Sort of like how capitalizing God in a story about Christians doesn't invalidate the beliefs of people who worship multiple gods.
> Or when the BBC framed an Ad as racist
The first line: "Scottish Labour has described [...]".
> Or when the BBC framed an Ad as racist, because it called out a politician's sectarian & anti-LGBTQ appeals
This is an insane characterisation of that article, which seems fair to me and not at all what I was talking about. Wanting your race to be represented in politics is a perfectly reasonable view and it doesn't need "calling out".
You should watch the original video, not just the BBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kucaq6jkHMg . The reddit thread and other articles also provide context that the BBC article glossed over & excluded.
The way I see it: a politician was intimating to a community, known for its conservative religious practices, that they can one day enforce their ideal in their children's education. If the dogwhistle is too quiet, consider how Muslims, Christians and other non-racial communities drove the US Supreme Court ruling to allow opt-out of LGBTQ education.
IMHO, the insane idea is "a community is a race". As if South Asians getting more votes translates directly to "representing their race", not their culture or religion. It's a similar kind of crazy to "Islamophobia is basically racism" which the UK government has been trying to legislate: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2588955/amp
Is that why they come across as so antisemitic?
Obviously there are biased antisemitic news organizations, but of the high-profile ostensibly neutral ones BBC stands head and shoulders above the rest in the level of antisemitism.
(You don't have to take my word for it - a quick Google will find huge numbers of examples. Usually they'll get criticized and then post a correction, so in some sense they themselves acknowledge the problem - yet it keeps happening.)
Which definition of "semite" are we using, today? It tends to get thrown around to mean a lot of different things on HN.
You're happy to redefine genocide in a ludicrously expansive fashion but pretend to need clarification about what antisemitic means in this context? I know, you're just asking questions.
"Semitic" is a word that includes both hebrews and arabs, because both are classified as descendants of Shem in the Bible.
Despite that, most people who use the word "antisemitic" apply it only to something that is done against hebrews, and not to something done against arabs.
Therefore it makes sense to request clarification about what someone means by that word, i.e. if they meant that BBC is anti-Israel or it is anti-arabs.
It would be much better if everyone who means that something is anti-Israeli, would say it clearly, instead of using the ambiguous word "antisemitic".
The word "Semitic" has been created due to a misunderstanding of the Bible, because there the classification of the people was not based on real descendance from common ancestors, but it was based on the political dependence of those people at the time when the Book of Genesis was written. Unfortunately, nobody has found a suitable replacement for this word.
(In the Bible, the descendants of Shem were those dominated by Assyro-Babylonia, while the descendants of Ham were those dominated by Egypt, regardless of their true ancestors. For instance the Phoenicians were classified as descendants of Ham and the Hebrews as descendants of Shem, despite being 2 extremely closely related populations, separated by little else except their different religions.)
Yes, of course. But in this context there was no confusion and no ambiguity.
Besides the systemic persecution, slaughter and annexation of Semitic arabs in the Levant, today.
And you're just clarifying to make sure you're not misunderstanding that the discussion regarding BBC antisemitic bias might be about Semitic arabs?
I don't believe I ever did that. Sounds like you're deflecting.
You never did what? Deflecting what?
Meanwhile in the pro-Palestine movement, the BBC is seen as being so pro-Israel some people think their editors should be prosecuted[1]! (for what, I am unclear on)
112 BBC journalists recently signed an open letter accusing the BBC of pro-Israel bias[2].
Domestically, every single political movement feels the BBC is biased against them. Their dry reporting style is at odds with what many, especially Americans, are used to. Unlike the author of that blogpost I do not really have a problem with them not using the word 'genocide' but I do take issue with some of their selective reporting (of course, every outlet must make a selection and everyone will have a problem with it). For example, Israeli newpaper Haaretz has been doing a lot of reporting on IDF soldiers being ordered to fire on crowds of unarmed civilians at aid sites[3]. The BBC does acknowledge it, but it's buried behind a headline about the IDF starting an investigation[4]. They do this because they always prefer quotes from official sources to eyewitness stuff.
[1]: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2025-06-20/bbc-editors-tr... [2]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n3926pSPNwXd8j7I716CBJEz... [3]: https://archive.is/pQw3k [4]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj9vveg0vp9o
> Is that why they come across as so antisemitic?
If you're inclined to offer the most charitable interpretation in the universe, perhaps.
This really is not it.
Outright lies are very ineffective in manipulating public opinion because they can be easily disproven.
It's much more about pretending its only a little rain when its raining alot. Ignoring the rain when it doesnt support your narrative. Pretending the rain is really important when its not important at all. Pretending it only rains where you are and much less everywhere else etc etc etc.
Have you looked at American politics recently? The current administration creates huge lies daily, and most of the media relays them uncritically. It's a level of shamelessness previously reserved for countries like Russia.
The previous administration lied alot too but because of your own personal bias you are unable to see that.
I don't hold them in my heart, but no comparison is possible here.
Of course, that's as expected.
What is? Can you seriously claim that Trump and his administration are acting more truthfully than Biden's? Don't be stupid.
Just look at what happened in Iran, it's a shitfest of constantly changing narratives, going from warmongerism to peace claims. Lying about what they did and wether it was successful. Lying about wether Israel is on board with making peace.
Difference of degree.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/27/politics/donald-trump-joe-bid...
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> Outright lies are very ineffective in manipulating public opinion because they can be easily disproven.
I sincerely wish this were true. "A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on."
Convenient half-truths, distortions, mis-characterizations (to support a desired narrative) go alot farther, faster.
reminds me of the essay "Politics and the English Language" George Orwell wrote in 1946, it's a good read
If “the administration” is The Good Party, the action is “groundbreaking” and “landmark.” If the administration is The Bad Man, the action is “unprecedented.” This is how you frame things to maximize the propaganda effect and scare/please the audience, while maintaining plausible deniability that you’re definitely not pushing an agenda.
(If my comment offends you, I assure you, don’t worry, your party is definitely the Good Party in this scenario.)
I'm well aware of how spin works. However, that doesn't mean that such characterizarions are always wrong. One of the severe problems in current politics is that reporting that looks bad for a particular party will always be characterized as biased, whether the reporting is accurate or not.
(off-topic)
> characterizarions
Sigh, mobile keyboard. *characterizations
"It says here in this history book that, luckily, the good guys have won every single time"
Today, somewhere in the world, some people made an event occur. Some people approved and some people disapproved. It impacted some people more than others, which some people think may be a bad thing, although others think that it may have been a good thing. The event stemmed from many past events, which many people have various strong opinions about. Politicians made various strong statements about the event, as well as a few celebrities. The future impact of the event is under debate, though experts agree that the situation is complicated and people should probably think about it very carefully before coming to conclusions. It is unclear what the market will do in response to this event.
> Party A: wants to abolish slavery
> Party B: wants way more slaves
> Media: record low percentage of Americans satisfied with agriculture today!
Impartiality is very important.
In unrelated news:
General Sherman Begins Demolition in Georgia For Urgently Needed Infrastructure Projects
I mean, you could ask ChatGPT or something to make some pretty braindead impartial newspaper headlines about, like, the Holocaust or slavery. I guess you're right, in some cases, impartiality will come off as a bit ridiculous to the common sense segment of society.
Welp, I’ve read every newspaper article - at least I have an excuse not to read the news anymore for my sanity.
Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U4Ha9HQvMo>
The problem with trying too hard to neutrally report both sides of a story is that's not unbiased either, it's just biased in favour of the side that can lie the most convincingly.
I am so, so tired, of "both sides" reporting. How about just report the facts instead?
It's a rare issue that you can't swing both ways by selecting the subset of facts to focus on. Attention doesn't just matter, it's all that matters. This is why adversarial forums are so important even if they so often degenerate into shouting past one another: each side has the ability and motivation to bring its strongest facts, so they are at least present in the discussion, even if debate tactics add tons of noise and confirmation bias dampens the effects.
Yes, in principle, but I object to "reporters" merely quoting people instead of attempting to actually verify if what they said has any basis in reality.
That being said, I'm not sure how much this actually matters, trump seems to pretty comprehensively prove that people would rather hear lies, even if they know they are lies.
Nearly all political issues are rooted in philosophical differences of opinion. "The facts" are merely the icing on the cake that various factions use to lure people to their ideology. Factual reporting is better than direct opinion reporting, but both are inherently interpreted by people in the context of the Overton window.
You're not wrong, but very often those philosophical differences are being masked by lies.
I don't want to get into the gory details in this tiny text box, but any number of current fear based political campaigns use wildly "distorted" facts to bolster their arguments, and most of the time reporters just blindly repeat whatever the person says without attempting to verify it.
First you'd have to get people to agree on what a fact is, let alone what the facts are.
Because there’s basically no such thing and choosing which facts you report is a huge source of bias anyway
It's also naturally biased in favor of whoever is more extreme. It's like trying to balance a scale so you place both items on the scale... but one is a rock and the other is a feather.
> Several sentences in the story were flagged as biased, including this one: "It’s the first time in 60 years that a president has mobilized a state’s National Guard without receiving a request to do so from the state’s governor." According to the bias indicator, this sentence is "framing the action as unprecedented in a way that might subtly critique the administration." It was best to give more context to “balance the tone."
"Might subtly critique"?! This isn't protecting versus bias, this isn't even charitably regardable as cowardice.
It's an attack on reason & reporting. To shield the worst cry bullies & offenders. It's ghastly how basic simple reporting so offends, that the public interest is sabotaged by these foes. We face such a need to improve the media, and this is the opposite path, of craven blunt un-intelligently intermediated corporatism.
I said to a colleague the other day that Law360’s reporting seems to be more tortuous and weird than usual. I wonder if this is why.
There was one piece on a case I’ve been following quite closely where I was genuinely unable to make sense of what had happened from the Law360 report without sitting down and spelling my way through it.
Remember kids, if you don't like the truth, just accuse it of being biased and force it to change!
Truth is biased. That's what makes it truth.
If you wanted unbiased information, you should have asked for facts..
and then collected as many of them as you possibly could.
More people should really read Baudrillard. Objectivity and language don't combine very well. Show me a person who wants the facts and I'll show you someone who is easily manipulated.
"Bias" and "narrative" have become meaningless words that people use when encountering ideas they don't like. Or when they believe that neither side could ever be right about an issue, that it's virtuous for a stance to be in the middle of the current Overton window.
Even presenting a given problem as "merely" two-sided is often disingenuous.
For instance, if you "just" look at abortion, trans rights, and immigration, you may assume the two parties in america present diametrically-opposed groups of people (...which is even itself quite debatable). But this is only because the two parties don't differ much (or at least, don't bother to platform enough to evaluate) on most topics politics could be about.
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to presume that more valid positions are likely to be found closer to the midpoint of the current Overton window. I suspect that as a matter of Bayesian probability, more extreme positions are more likely to be wrong.
The whole premise of the Overton window is that it does not represent the full spectrum of opinions on some issues, which is unchanging, but rather some socially constructed window onto that spectrum, which does change. Assuming that the midpoint is probably correct is equivalent to saying that any change from the status quo is probably bad. Is that what you really mean?
Based on a gander at history, I doubt it. Usually one side is actually right and it seems very obvious now but was not obvious at the time. And, typically, the moderate or midpoint position seem incredibly stupid now. Like the 3/5ths compromise.
On which topic? Saying the average person can't decide between two viewpoints on any given topic seems ridiculous.
I don't like this idea. Bias is lying to advance your position. Narrative is telling a story to persuade instead of making an argument to persuade.
While I'd favor defining words rather than claiming they're meaningless, those aren't accurate definitions.
"Narrative" in this context is more like "attempting to steer the current discourse by making connections among things and positioning them as part of a coherent story", which can be positive (if the result is accurate and reasonable and helps people better understand what's going on) or negative (if it's spin or manufacturing consent). It's "narrative" to say "you should be afraid of X, it's the cause of all your problems". It's also "narrative" to say "here are the five different things we're currently doing to improve Y, and how they tie together into a coherent picture".
Also, bias would be easier to deal with if it were always "lying", or if it advanced a coherent position. It's much broader than that.
LLMs and ML algorithms are beginning to influence the entire lifecycle of articles: researching, writing, editing, publication, discovery (TikTok), and consumption (ChatGPT summarize this). With the few big players, it could be the same model involved at every step. It's scary how a small change to a system prompt could subtly influence things across the board and guide popular opinion.
Who checks the bias detector for bias?
This creates an infinite regress problem - bias detection systems are themselves trained on data reflecting human judgments about what constitutes "bias."
That's the nice thing. You don't. The conceit of centrism/Liberalism is that extreme voices cancel out. Just ingest a large enough corpus and the central limit theorum takes care of the rest.
I have so many question.
Let's say a media outlet, like a newspaper, commits to common journalism best practices, such as neutrality. In my opinion, this does not mean avoiding certain words; it means presenting different perspectives on a topic based on evidence.
Besides that, if someone writes an Op-Ed or commentary, the author expresses their personal opinion. How does this work with this AI thingy? Currently it looks like plain censorship, isn't it?
And why should I buy a newspaper that does not represent my political or personal opinion? I thought that was how it worked.
well, in this particular example I think the answer is straightforward: it's just an ad so it doesn't matter.
This is a marketing/sales piece for LexisNexis by their marketing agency as they try to sell AI services to their customers (law firms and other legal professions). It gives them a news article to share with their customers and tell them something like "see, we're taking the AI plunge. You should too. We offer a bunch of legal AI services, lets talk". Now their CEO and sales people can keep saying "I'm sure you've seen the news about Law360. We think AI is finally ready for legal tasks. You know, as an assistant."
In reality, they are probably to run the article, look at what the AI says and shrug and move on.
To me, a newsroom's bias IS its value. If you let me know your values, I can actually interpret what you're saying. It's the pretense of impartiality that makes me distrust someone.
What I do not understand is this top-down mandate that people use specific tools.
Mandate productivity, mandate quality; the tools will be adopted if they are sharp.
But elevating the way work is performed above the work itself? Weird.
It's because the executives don't trust the journalists to do the work properly.
The article says that explicitly: customers have complained about the quality of the work. The business owners view unhappy customers as a threat to their business, and so have introduced automation to make product quality higher and more even. The workers are unhappy because they don't want to be automated away and resent the implication that their artisanally hand-crafted articles aren't good enough. This is a very old story that's been going on for hundreds of years. There's nothing special about it.
I don't know how you read this article and came away that they were merely trying to force adoption of AI tools.
This is LexisNexis requiring all of their workers run their output through a censorship machine to comply with the whims of the current administration. It has zero benefits to the workers so of course they have to mandate it
Does this mean automated censorship by AI "bias" detection?
Who watches the watchers?
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