this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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News sources should not have orientations. They should be neutral. If they have a political orientation they are not my favourite source at all
There's no such thing as having no orientation. Being honest about it is better than false neutrality.
I don't think this is true.
I agree that nobody can be neutral, but reporting news should at least try to be. It is basically just telling facts about what is going on in the world. I understand that being totally objective is not possible, but not trying, and reporting facts with an agenda is not a news source that I would take seriously
How do you choose what facts matter? How do you choose how to communicate them? Who do you communicate them to? What does news reporting mean to you? What about news reporting makes it worth your precious time alive? What purpose do the people around you have when they amplify, ignore, or quiet your facts? These are all questions that are answered, explicitly or not, by everyone who communicates or relates to facts.
We could play the impossible "no agenda" game. We could lie to ourselves and to others. Or, we could notice that whenever we are dealing with the truth, we have a point of view. We stand here and not there. We can learn to travel around the mountain of truth, so that we mitigate our blindspots. We can be explicit about where in the mountain we are standing (The north base? The vegetated slope? The summit?).
Instead of playing the "god trick", we can situate our knowledge. That's the best we can do. Check out this article by Donna Haraway on situated knowledge. It changed my life. https://philpapers.org/archive/harskt.pdf
That's not something that exists, nor is it possible.
I know that it is not possible, but actively having an orientation just makes for bad journalism. Reporting on news from both sides, and not sensationalizing news or the way they are reported, should be key factors of any good source of news