@Sacto Mitch posted:.
All reporting is biased.
Mr. Heisenberg taught us you can't measure something without changing it a little, and reporting is something like that.
The sky may be blue, but just how blue depends on who's doing the reporting, when they looked at the sky, and what color sunglasses they like to wear.
They might show you photographs of the blue that support their report, but they probably won't show you the outtakes that don't. That's called 'editing'.
If you keep hearing that the sky is blue but you're more comfortable under a pink sky, you can probably find a reporter who will tell you that the sky is pink - if you look hard enough.
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Absolutely right! What's funny is that science is almost exactly the same. Not to offend anyone, but there are "scientists" who are happy to report findings that support the agenda of their funders, who have deep personal beliefs about the dangers of 5G cell towers, who know that measles vaccine will give you autism, etc.
At least the scientific method has a process to address bias even though it takes a while to work. Peer review is the first filter: imagine if every reporter had to submit their stories to other reporters who were specialists on the topic before the story was published. Methods, sources and replication are another filter: imagine if reporters had to share enough information for other reporters to redo the interviews and research to see if they came to the same conclusions.
Scientists' reputations among their peers help determine if they get that next grant, are invited to that next conference, get tenure or promotion and get their work published. That doesn't mean that bad science doesn't happen every day, it just means that there's a generally agreed upon way to figure out what theories have the best chance of explaining things.
As one of my old teachers liked to say "Never argue from a non-rejected null hypothesis." Just because you can't prove something isn't false doesn't mean it is true.