al_yrpal wrote: ↑24 May 2022, 2:20pm
Some years ago when we got a paper delivered monthly I tried TheTimes, the Telegraph, the Independent and the Guardian for a month each to decide what to buy in future. I never read 'columnists' or pundits in any paper because they all come over as biased. I found that The Times, in its news articles was surprisingly the least biased and most newsworthy of all.
The Guardian is IMO a heavily biased read, its free online and that encourages many to swallow all its lies and half truths (its worldview) whole.
Al
In reading and judging those various newspaps you list, what benchmark do you already have with which to measure the bias of the various news organs? Logically, you must already have a set of beliefs against which you make such measurements - a set of beliefs that will contain their own "lies and half-truths".
Judging your own pronouncements about this forum, against my own set of beliefs and their bias, I consider your views to be mostly "lies and half-truth" for example.
Of course, you will have a similar view of my own beliefs and pronouncements.
In short, truth is, to a significant degree, never objective but always relative.
So, how can we judge which beliefs and associated pronouncements, attitudes, recommendations, policies, laws et al are "better" than others? There are several methods. For example .....
If a body of beliefs and their associated directives or recommendations for policies, actions and behaviours result in a high degree of the objectives being realised, with a minimum number of associated unintended consequences, then we can say that the body of beliefs involved is "better" than a body of beliefs that rarely results in any of their intended outcomes or predictions realising. Contrast, for example, the current body of beliefs and their predictions generated by international science against the body of beliefs and their generated predictions contained within any religion.
There are several other "truth tests" of this kind that can demarcate resilient and useful beliefs systems from the other sort. When we apply such truth tests to the beliefs and predictions of some political parties or their newspaper propaganda organs, it often becomes clear that some of them are extremely poor at making accurate predictions of future conditions based on their bodies of belief. Tory policies, for example, often result in the opposite of what the supported/supposed beliefs and policies state as their intended outcomes.
And let us not forget that most commercial "belief systems" are made-up-stuff that is not interested in any kind of truth other than "what will sell the best". This now applies to the vast majority of newspaps, which are more infotainment than any kind of effort to discover various truths in a rigorous, objective or "scientific" fashion. Trying to pretend that reading them all then condensing the "truthful" parts from the rest is rather like a curate pretending to the bishop that his rotten eggs are "good in parts, m'lord".
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes