The journalistic writing style is defined to be informative and objective, preaching only facts upon which readers may construct an opinion, so, obviously, good journalism (in non-opinion articles) should be as bi-partisan, as unbiased, and as detailed as possible.
However, as news sources struggled for business, journalists created Yellow Journalism and wrote articles that aligned with popular local views.
This was furthered in 1991 with the inception of a public World Wide Web that gave the populous easy access to hundreds of online news sites, and as technology continued to advance, so did people’s instantaneous access to current events.
According to Google’s trend-search, the interest of keywords (a measure of how often a word is used) such as “bias,” “fake news,” “conservative,” “liberal,” and “opinion” in news and web searches has increased since 2004, following a general increase in opinion writing and progressively tainted news supporting certain stances.
These trends prove the obvious; online news has turned towards supporting their readers’ wants and away from purely objective news writing.
Of course, even the most reliable publications will have articles that are of lesser quality, so there should always be an aversion to the belief that a certain news source will be infallibly consistent in its writings.
Anything that expresses extensive bias should be entirely ignored when searching for a good source. These lower-tier papers can generally be identified by click-bait headlines, hard-to-read writing, and clear opinions in every article.
Decent sources are best described to have either basic, objective overviews of events or detailed, slightly biased descriptions. Many business-oriented papers fall into the latter category while most broadcast-based sources fall into the former.
Local publications (high school and city-based newspapers) tend to have a regional bias that matches the general opinions of the local population but are often the best (if not the only) sources for local events and for describing the impact of nation-wide changes on the local scale.
Given enough time, the absolute best way to get reputable, unbiased information is to find direct documents or statistics.
While it may seem difficult to get such information, organizations such as the United Nations and the U.S.A federal government have records for every law, census, meeting, statistic, etc. at the public’s disposal online.
So, instead of complaining about untrustworthy sources and a lack of credible facts, look beyond the introductory summaries of news sites and research everything.
This editorial reflects the views of the Scot Scoop editorial board. This editorial was written by Ben Balster.
