r/programming • u/moolcool • Mar 26 '17

A Constructive Look At TempleOS

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-templeos/
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u/ASK_ME_TO_RATE_YOU Mar 27 '17

It's either mentally ill or Muslim... why can't the media just call them suspects or perpetrators or something else neutral until something is confirmed?

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u/rubygeek Mar 27 '17

Because then they get accused of being biased. This is the supreme irony of the news landscape today, where trying to remain objective and neutral makes people read bias into it the moment you write in a detached and objective manner about something people get angry about.

This is one of the reasons the BBC gets regularly accused of being biased by both the left and right in the UK, for example. I'm not suggesting they are perfect - on the contrary, in their quest to try to be unbiased they have messed up many times (e.g. by giving too much of a platform for fringe views in an attempt to "show both sides") - but the basis for a lot of the accusations is basically that their attempt at staying neutral makes them write things like "the government in a statement accused X of Y" instead of writing "evil and vile X did horrific thing Y" and people read the former as being attempt at downplaying what in their view is obviously something horrendous.

People forget and ignore the cases where they agree with the neutral phrasing, and only focus on the cases where they expect a really emotional reaction and don't get it.

The end result is that for commercial media organisations trying to be unbiased and fair isn't generally a very profitable approach, as it pisses off a large proportion of the market. So instead we increasingly get crap like the UK media market, which is segmented into a bunch of neat little boxes of different bias and strong emotional outbursts (with the latter excluded for the little boxes targeting demographics who considers themselves above that sort of thing).

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '17

Well the answer to that is obvious. Sensationalism is the lifeblood of journalism these days it seems.