Posted by
Nerdus Maximus on Saturday, September 30, 2006 3:02:58 PM
Bias and beauty must have a lot in common as both are in the eye of the
beholder. The Conservatives point out liberal bias and the
Liberals point out conservative bias. I'll leave it to you to
decide who makes the better case, but will offer some tools for
verifying bias - yours or someone else's.
The most unavoidable
and difficult to detect bias is in the decision on what to
publish. That is why your bias detector needs a Content Distribution Analyzer.
There is not enough time to cover everything, so an
"editorial decision" has to be made about what is important enough to
be published. The conservative blogoshpere has many posts about
Liberal media that cover anything negative about the President but
nothing positive about what is happening in Iraq. This is a reflection of a decision, conscious or unconscious, as to what is "important" enough to spend limited time and publishing bandwidth to cover. Apparently I think understanding bias is "important".
What does it tell us when we get a bias alarm from our Content Distribution Analyzer? Mostly it tells us that anyone who spends all of their time on a single topic or point of view is likely to think that topic or viewpoint is "important", and others aren't. This is a bias of omission.
It is wise to
note, however, that we also make editorial decisions about what to read
or watch. One of the dangers of mega-multi-channel technology is that each of us can choose to hear only messages that agree with us. So, go read a Liberal before the Content Distribution Analyzer goes off on you.
Nerdus
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