Who isn't a big fan of "impartial" news? People who don't have power
87 comments
·April 9, 2025karaterobot
Capricorn2481
The point is that the closest definition people see for impartiality is "something that doesn't move the needle either way." In other words, maintaining the status quo. Protecting the way things are now is not true impartiality, it's prolonging systems. It's inertia.
BrenBarn
Maybe, but I think that's also a misconception that shouldn't be kowtowed to. Impartiality has nothing to do with moving needles. It's not about what's going to happen. It's just about accurate statements about things that have already happened.
AlotOfReading
There are an infinite number of possible events to report, an infinite number of facts about those events to report on, and in most interesting cases the "facts" may not be known or objective. Take these two different summaries of the arrest of O.J. Simpson:
AP:
O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and friend Ronald Goldman are found dead in Los Angeles. Simpson is arrested after a widely televised freeway chase in his white Ford Bronco.
O.J. Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, were stabbed and slashed to death outside her condominium in the trendy Brentwood neighborhood. The former football star was arrested after fleeing from police in a 90 minute chase along the 405.
tshaddox
It's very weird and suspect to say "impartial" if what you mean is simply "accurate."
goatlover
I don't see how an independent press striving for impartiality is somehow maintaining the status quo. It's just trying to report whatever news it has, which may or may not be challenging to the status quo. The alternative is propaganda.
Also, I don't know why the status quo is inherently a bad thing, wouldn't it all depend on what that status quo was in relation to whatever issue? Shouldn't we ant a society where the status quo is optimal? Not simply being contrarians.
lazide
Being relative to the status quo means the news would be focused on maintaining the current state, regardless of if it is optimal or not (and optimal for whom, anyway?).
eli_gottlieb
If I tell you that the sky is blue, COVID kills people, and coal emits CO2, that's "impartial" in the sense of being facts.
lazide
Not arguing with you per-se, but….
The sky is also yellow, red, and purple in the mornings and evenings. It is also gray when there are storms, and black at night.
Covid kills people, but is it a lot? Or a little? Many things kill people, but I don’t get worried about lightning or sharks. Some people do. Relative to those, how dangerous is it?
Coal emits co2, but why should I care?
beau_g
What would your feelings be on a news outlet called "Public Health Watch" publishing 250 well researched, factually verified articles on dangers of wearing masks long term from 2020-2021 and zero articles on COVID mortality? How about a source called "Atmosphere Guardian" publishing hundreds of factual articles on pollution from solar panel production and li-on battery recycling while publishing zero on coal? The curation and focus of news sources can do a lot to not be impartial even when only dealing in factual information.
ryandv
As one who is steeped in the language, culture, and thought processes of science, engineering, technology, and medicine (STEM) fields you may be forgiven for believing that facts still exist.
> I'm not ceding this ground. [...] The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative.
The humanities have long ago dispensed with facts since the advent of postmodernism; the ground has already been ceded. Yuval Noah Harari summarizes this eloquently in his latest work Nexus:
In the late twentieth century, for example, intellectuals from the
radical left like Michel Foucault and Edward Said claimed that scientific
institutions like clinics and universities are not pursuing timeless and objective
truths but are instead using power to determine what counts as truth, in the
service of capitalist and colonialist elites. These radical critiques occasionally
went as far as arguing that “scientific facts” are nothing more than a capitalist
or colonialist “discourse” and that people in power can never be really
interested in truth and can never be trusted to recognize and correct their own
mistakes.felipeerias
The status that journalism still enjoys comes from providing an impartial and objective account of reality. A journalism that openly becomes just another form of political activism will lose what is left of that status.
Why should someone listen to a journalist instead of to a random guy on social media, if neither of them is striving to be impartial and reliable?
Capricorn2481
This is a question that presupposes there are any impartial journalists. That is the point. I understand everyone thinks the news they listen to is impartial.
wisty
Impartiality is a process to get closer to the truth. If something is contested, then seek statements from both sides. Trust that eventually the audience will figure it out, and things will eventually no longer be contested (beyond some "lizardman constant" that is ignored - you don't need to seek views that are totally insignificant).
The alternative is that people decide the other side is "false news" and now everyone drifts into polarised bubbles.
Capricorn2481
And what if a side is false news? There is news reported from both CNN and Fox that has been completely false.
It would not be impartial to let them lie in an effort to get to the truth. You would have to correct them, at which point someone is going to call you partial. Journalism is about actively finding the truth, but you can see in this thread, people's idea of impartiality is letting everyone talk and shrugging.
null
MBCook
But how do we define/measure impartiality without reference to the Overton window?
pchangr
You can define it in terms of language as such “whether the journalist uses rhetorical artifacts that distort the information to support his opinion, or not.” (1)
More definitions and discussions can be found in the paper.
1. Francisco-Javier Rodrigo-Ginés, Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz, Laura Plaza, A systematic review on media bias detection: What is media bias, how it is expressed, and how to detect it, Expert Systems with Applications, Volume 237, Part C, 2024, 121641, ISSN 0957-4174, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121641. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095741742...)
justlikereddit
[flagged]
beau_g
Do you mean for the framing of a piece, or the decision on what to report and to which degree/frequency? The former is more simple - 1. HORRIBLE MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (partial, even though it's within todays overton window) 2. FINALLY, AWESOME MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (partial, outside the overton window) 3. MASS GENOCIDE BEGINS IN SPRINGFIELD (impartial reporting)
Headline is obviously far more simple though, removing most adjectives does most of the job, and goes a long way in the content itself as well. Something like choosing which photos to run or editing of video clips would be a lot harder to quantify impartiality/bias, both measuring and for the person doing it I think. As for overall article frequency and depth of article per subject, I think that's where your Overton window question becomes far more difficult - you could quantify a given piece or source against all other news sources and find the edges and the median, but yeah, in most cases just everything is biased by the window at the macro level. You could go back in time and find the dead center median bias media source publishing glowing reports on bloodletting and public executions.
weregiraffe
And all the while there's NO genocide in Springfield....
lazide
Besides this issue, there is also the issue of who pays for it, and how are they paid?
ElevenLathe
I happen to disagree with you here, but ironically therefore am suspicious of this "finding". It seems to both tell us that impartiality is contextual and relative, but also that it objectively exists and can be measured. The whole thing in incoherent.
I think the bigger problem with our information diet is that we're constantly exposed to grade school level analysis that any twentieth century newspaper editor would have laughed out of the newsroom, whether they worked for the Wall Street Journal or Pravda. I'm ok with far right and far left rags sharing newsstand space (metaphorically) with establishment mainstream papers, but in 2025 very little of what we read is fit to be in a proper newspaper, including most of the stuff that actually is. Instead we get sloppy analysis like this that polarizes without illuminating anything. Even a committed Nazi can read The Nation and actually learn something. The same is not true of a committed Marxist reading the average right wing Substack.
malfist
I'm not sure impartiality is actually all that great. At least the way it's currently done.
Look at Elon's sieg heil during the inauguration. "Impartial" journalism referred to it as an "awkward hand gesture" or just talked about the controversy it caused. Very, very few journalist called a spade a spade, because that's taking a side.
Conscat
In the anglosphere, we live in a time when minorities are aggressively persecuted by world governments and a sizable portion of their population. Now isn't really the time for moralizing about impartiality in how this is communicated.
beloch
In recent years, I've come to appreciate "Talking Head" panel discussions when it comes to topics of great partiality, such as politics. Specifically, those that gather heads with differing opinions. e.g. CBC Canada's "Power & Politics" panels.
If you take people from opposite ends of the spectrum and put them in a well moderated environment, the discussion that results often helps you to appreciate the different angles that people approach political issues from. Aside from in the U.S. during recent years, political issues are usually a matter of perspective and shades of grey. i.e. If there is a black and white scientific consensus on a given topic, it rarely becomes a political topic (except recently in the U.S.). It's when people with different opinions explain their position and try to sway each other that you're most likely to see arguments that actually have some merit. Even if you are not swayed by an argument, at least you can get a sense of why somebody with a different perspective sees the issue that way.
Unfortunately, at lot of people, and I'll leave it up to others to speculate on who those predominantly are, are not curious about or interested in views that don't align with their own. They may perceive exposure to such views as aggression. i.e. If you express a view they don't agree with, they may see it as an attempt to force them to align with that view. This perception of persuasion as aggression may explain why some scientifically black and white issues have become political.
giantg2
"If there is a black and white scientific consensus on a given topic, it rarely becomes a political topic"
Science is one thing. How to implement that in policy is a different thing, and often is political.
ryandv
This sounds like a reprisal of the common far right bigoted refrain to platform "both sides" when we all know that reality obviously has a liberal bias [0]. This dog whistle for free speech was also used by John Stuart Mill, an influential figure in classical liberalism, the movement that provided the ideological roots of the modern alt-right extremist movement, in his treatise On Liberty from 1859 [1]:
It is also often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men
would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing
wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what
only such men would wish to practise.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm
beloch
For the record, I am to the left of U.S. democrats in most respects. To say that what I expressed above is a far-right dog-whistle or that the left does not have problems with disagreeing in a civil manner is just plain wrong.
Case in point: Go take a look at the recent history of Canada's federal Green party. Several years ago, its leader stepped down and the party imploded over their views on Israel and Gaza. (This was well before the current conflict went hot.) What does a conflict in the middle East have to do with a political party focused on environmentalism in Canada you ask? Nothing at all, but the disagreement still tore the party apart. Both sides of the conflict could not tolerate opposing views existing within their peers. It turned into an ugly open feud. Elizabeth May had to return from retirement and take control again to stop things. She remains co-Leader (but really leader).
Polite disagreement and understanding the other side, even while you disagree with it, is something everyone struggles with.
ConspiracyFact
Ah yes, John Stuart Mill, that evil mastermind of reaction...
somenameforme
The headline is false. As per the data from the article itself, only 24% of Americans preferred partial or biased media. The overwhelming majority of people without power prefer impartial media.
It just happens that of the relatively small percent of people that prefer partial or biased media, it's mostly made up of people with "no power." But even that is also dubious to plainly false since the article's definition of "no power" is very weird and includes anybody who is "ideologically or politically engaged", which is essentially every single person at the highest levels of power in the country.
dmix
It's also arguable whether or not the list of people who prefer that sort of media "don't have power". It is defined in the article as:
> (a) the ideological and politically engaged; (b) young people, especially those who rely mainly on social media for news; (c) women; and (d) less socioeconomically advantaged groups.
People in all of these groups can still have varying forms of power and influence in society. Politically, culturally, or economically.
This is borderline clickbait, which is sad because I like neimanlabs.
staticautomatic
What's at issue is not really whether they have power. It's whether they feel like they have power.
somenameforme
But then it becomes even weirder, because what percent of all people feel like they have "power"? Excepting an utterly negligible percent of people, I'd think somebody was bordering on megalomania (or an abundance of naivete) if he said he did.
riknos314
For me, impartiality is the wrong goal for a primary news source.
I want as close to the truth as is possible, with as little influence of the publication as possible. I want to have the option to take the in raw facts and contextualize them myself before I engage with external contexts.
Due to this, I've been quite a fan of the forbes YouTube channel of late. They've been uploading unedited clips of events with zero spin, commentary, or contextualization.
sodapopcan
Unfortunately… and I say this as someone who is prone to this… the vast majority of people (voters) need and/or want EVERYTHING summarized/explained for them.
mkoubaa
I agree, but those of us who do not want to outsource our thinking to someone else want nothing more than information.
ilrwbwrkhv
The great steve Ballmer also runs a just the facts YouTube channel which I found quite good.
travisjungroth
Critically, this is a stated versus a revealed preference. All these surveys tell you is that people in these groups are less likely to have a self image of valuing impartial news. It doesn’t tell you about their actual habits.
staticautomatic
While this is generally true, people do actually tend to consume media that comports with their existing or desired self-image. Source: I run insights & analytics for a media company.
baazaa
Or in other words dumb people are less impacted by social desirability bias when responding to the survey because they don't realise that 'impartiality' is something to be desired.
As for why impartial news does so poorly in practice, it's often because it's utterly uninformative. 'Car bomb goes off in Kabul' is worthless info to 100% of the population, whereas the moment you try to contextualise it 'Car bomb goes off in Kabul, which is becoming more frequent, which suggests administration is lying about how well the occupation is going' then you're no longer impartial.
Journalists and editors have spent the better part of a century stripping all useful information out of their articles in an effort to be impartial. It would be much better if they instead aimed for a diversity of opinions than a mythical objectivity devoid of ideological bias.
ryandv
> News outlets exist, in one sense at least, to serve their audiences. But they also exist to serve their advertisers. And their journalists exist in an uneasy symbiosis with a community’s institutions — government, police, schools, business, civil society — which are the subject of much of their work. Does “impartial” news represent a purity of audience service? Or some triangulation of all the various power sources and elite stakeholders that interact with it?
Not a new idea. Chomsky & Herman talked about the incident forces and special interests that act upon the government/media/advertising complex and the degree to which these forces influenced the content of mass media and television in the 80s in their book Manufacturing Consent. Similar considerations apply in the age of social media today.
ragtagtag
This is one area where richer countries can learn a lot from poorer countries, should they choose to listen.
When I lived in Liberia, there were about 10-15 different newspapers in the capital, from websites to print to one guy with a massive chalk board on the main road. This diversity of sources served quite a small population, but there was a massive appetite for news.
In such a situation, you don't expect impartiality, but each news organisation's perspective sites is more obvious, and reading about events from multiple perspectives gives, in my view, a broader and clearer window into what happened.
I think it could make sense to value in news, not impartiality, but diversity of viewpoints.
Conveniently, the internet does make this much easier.
giantg2
Alomg those same lines, even if something is considered impartial, we would need to gather multiple viewpoints to fact check that it actually is impartial.
neo1250
Do we have any documentation of the "revealed preferences" of the major news publications today? You would imagine that this bias/preference is readily available for internal (national) news outlets just like they are for international news sources. So many employees of these major news outlets have spoken up on the recent forced biased coverage in politics, war-time, conflicts etc. It would be nice to have a live cheatsheet to refer to any active biases being introduced by these major news outlets (and possibly linking their editorial/ownership relationships as well)
SanjayMehta
Ashley Rindsberg discusses NYT in his book “The Gray Lady Winked.”
taeric
This is one I find less than surprising. At least, less surprising than the lead in implies.
Would be like asking who wants news on the cutting edge of sports, versus who wants to know how their preferred team is doing.
Now, we like to think people used to be more aligned on the idea of the nation. Or general well being of the world. I am not too shocked to see that people have aligned with cohorts based on perceived identities. Even if I find it disheartening.
ternaryoperator
Clay Johnson's 2012 book, The Information Diet, discusses this phenomenon in the context of CNN going from a prime place in the news firmament to an also-ran when TV stations started driving news based on primary on their audience's political preferences. For a while, CNN still enjoyed a place as a definitive source whenever big events happened (national elections, disasters, etc.). But even that role was later subsumed by the biased TV sources.
In addition to viewer's preferences for their political slant on the news, I think that when CNN gave up the 24-hour Headline News, that probably diminished their role as well.
sorcerer-mar
It is totally worth reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death for a (quite depressing) macro picture theory of this evolution and its consequences on our collective ability to reason about the world.
ternaryoperator
Quite agreed. It's an extraordinary book that's far more relevant than Postman could ever have imagined.
Apreche
The seems to define impartial news as news that has no particular point of view. What does that mean to not have a point of view? Any news source is disseminating information. This always carries the point of view that the information being disseminated is factual.
If we’re talking about pure opinions, like movie reviews, I would argue that isn’t news.
Many people seem to think that impartial news is news that covers all sides. They share all purported and contradictory information from all sources without confirming which information is true, and which is not. This allows the audience to decide for themselves how to see the world rather than being forced to see the world as it is. The upside is not being forced to see only a false world as envisioned by others who may have unseemly motives. The downside is many are left confused and unsure what is true. This defeats the purpose of news entirely, as the audience is just as uninformed after reading as they were before.
The only truly impartial news source is one that will adhere to rigorous standards of evidence. Given all the available information they will take a firm stand in declaring what the facts are, and to what degree of certainty.
The problem is that in a world with vaccine deniers, climate denial, etc. a purely fact-based and impartial source of news would be branded as very extremist.
danielheath
“There was a time the news told you what had happened, and you had to figure out how you felt about it. Now, the news tells you how to feel about it, and you have to figure out whether or not it happened“.
I have been enjoying “The Continent” lately- not perfectly, but it does largely stick to reporting established facts with less emphasis on whether or not they’re a good thing.
healsdata
I would go so far as to say it's nearly impossible to have completely impartial news. Everyone has biases and pressure being applied to them that will appear in their work. As we've seen just this year, an author's choice of style guide is political.
freen
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tomhow
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
weregiraffe
And people dislike biases, which is why reality can't win elections...
ryandv
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paulpauper
i think the author confuses news with op-ed. If there is a breaking story, I want to know what is going on, but for opinions, ppl generally want their biases or worldviews confirmed.
> All of which is to say that audience desire for “impartiality” is profoundly contextual — embedded in the particular political, social, and economic environment that people live in. It’s less an iron law of journalism than an incentive-driven response to conditions. “It is up to news organizations and journalists, therefore,” the authors conclude, “to evaluate which approach better suits their contexts.”
I'm not ceding this ground. We need news that strives for impartiality, and even if people don't want it, they need to get it anyway. The customer is not always right, and everything is not relative.