I probably shouldn't have mentioned ProjectVeritas because many people instantly go into "sports team" mode and ignore the main point, but I wanted to point out how understanding a media entity's bias is a good thing and I used them as an example of a media entity that has a well-understood bias.
My greater point is that any media entity's work only conceivably presents a barrier to accurately understanding the world if you don't understand that they have a point of point of view they advocate for.
If you know that ProjectVeritas has a point of view that they advocate for and lean towards one side of the political aisle or the other, then you can take that information into account when gauging the accuracy of their stories and the likelihood that they're not presenting the facts accurately. ProjectVeritas presents no danger to the world even if their stories are always 100% wrong precisely because their bias is well-known and understood; and the visceral reaction to them here very clearly indicates that their bias is well-known.
The real risk comes when a media entity claims to be objective and unbiased when this should be understood to be impossible: no human being has zero bias.
> If you know that ProjectVeritas has a point of view that they advocate for and lean towards one side of the political aisle or the other, then you can take that information into account when gauging the accuracy of their stories and the likelihood that they're not presenting the facts accurately. ProjectVeritas presents no danger to the world even if their stories are always 100% wrong precisely because their bias is well-known and understood
That’s how it’s supposed to work but in practice it’s messier: not everyone is fully informed and following these stories, and context is often stripped as a story is promoted to other levels of media. The fairly large fraction of people who only read the headline probably don’t make it 6 paragraphs in where the reporter at a larger journal mentions the original source, or have the context to realize that the dueling quotes they’re presenting were all inspired by a dubious outrage-bait story rather than something real.
I don't want to seem mean-spirited to anybody, but the crowd of people who aren't capable of even understanding ProjectVeritas' bias is completely useless to any serious discussion or debate of ideas that advances the understanding of the world. So why should society harm the debate between the capable people by catering to the least common denominator that will never contribute anything of worth in this domain?
My greater point is that any media entity's work only conceivably presents a barrier to accurately understanding the world if you don't understand that they have a point of point of view they advocate for.
If you know that ProjectVeritas has a point of view that they advocate for and lean towards one side of the political aisle or the other, then you can take that information into account when gauging the accuracy of their stories and the likelihood that they're not presenting the facts accurately. ProjectVeritas presents no danger to the world even if their stories are always 100% wrong precisely because their bias is well-known and understood; and the visceral reaction to them here very clearly indicates that their bias is well-known.
The real risk comes when a media entity claims to be objective and unbiased when this should be understood to be impossible: no human being has zero bias.