If a news source tells both sides of a political story how can it be biased?

Your bias is showing.

Pretty much all network news media is left-wing biased to a degree with the exception of Fox news and a few online/paper sources and talk radio. MSNBC and CNN are the worst offenders. Reuters is mostly fair as far as I can tell. @SQUEEKY2 You seem to rail on right-wingers to a degree that I believe is unhealthy. I don’t think you make an effort to try to understand them. I think you have a picture in your head of who you think they are and it’s not likely to be very objective.

No such thing as “both sides”.

There’s more than 2 sides, and I agree with @Blackwater_Park about your obsessions.

There is something called the “neutrality bias”. About 15 years ago, CNN had this kind of reporting. They would invite guests to talk about evolution or climate change, one would be a respected scientist, and the other would be a fringe right winger who didn’t believe in science. And CNN acted as though the verdict was still out on the issue. That’s biased reporting in favor of keeping their donors and corporate sponsors happy. With the recent firing of CNN’s president, they’re planning on going back to this horrible format.

By the way, it’s a fact that Biden did not steal the election, and that Trump did not have votes stolen from him. Are you labeling this as a “one side” of the issue? I don’t see how, considering this is a fact. It would be utterly ridiculous to give credence to conspiracy theorists, solely to be “fair” to the other side. Especially when the other side is wrong.

Apologies though if I’m making assumptions about your views with my choice of example.

A political story has more than two sides and one biased viewpoint isn’t balanced by including another biased viewpoint. What reporting needs more than anything else is integrity, on the part of the reporter and on the part of the media organisation he or she works for. To stand up and tell the truth unflinchingly, as you see it, while being shot at from both sides. That is what gains my respect.

I think we’re seeing a rapid decline in journalistic standards and quality. We saw a brief peak during the Murrow-Cronkite era and it’s been slowly eroding since. News source on both sides of the aisle are now all aimed at specific ideological niches. The NY Times refused to cover Biden’s laptop, still clings to the Russian collusion narrative despite it having been thoroughly disproven and shown to be a fabrication of the Clinton campaign. Open the NY Times or WaPost websites and every article is loaded with emotional bias words meant to tell you what to think about a thing that happened. Just because they quote an ‘other side’ opinion at the end doesn’t change the bias of the whole.

The right wing sources are, IMHO, generally worse. The right is the one that was elbowed out of the mainstream sources, so this isn’t super surprising, but you’re seeing increasing reliance on sources that aren’t even ATTEMPTING journalism. During the 2020 “steal”, a conservative friend of mine sent me dozens of links to right wing stories about the steal. Every single one was easy to debunk if you take 5 minutes. They depend on people NOT taking that time b/c most people won’t. I even tried to look up who was behind these sites and most are people with ZERO journalistic qualifications or experience. One was a former John Deere model. That was his qualification for running a successful conservative journalistic source.

I think both sides are nuts. Every news source has bias. Try to find one that works hard to keep it’s bias out of it’s news pages. The Wall Street Journal actually does this pretty well. FAR better than WaPost or NY Times in my experience. WSJ’s op/ed page is heavily right leaning, but it’s news pages are run separately.

So here’s what I do…find two source (MINIMUM), one left and one right leaning, but both as close to the center as you can get. Look at their articles. Look for emotional bias language in them. If they have it, move on and find something else. Once you find them, when there’s a controversial issue, read about that issue in both. See what one points out and the other doesn’t. You’ll find that simply EXCLUDING information is the most common and sneaky form of bias. This is why the NY Times refused to cover the Biden scandals until after they were irrelevant. It’s why conservative sources don’t do the homework to point out how the 2020 “steal” never happened.

But if you consume both, you’ll figure out what each side is leaving out, and then you can do your own research.

@Entropy – foreign sources reported US news can do that. I find that BBC and Al Jazeera are relatively neutral on US issues. BBC, as expected, has a bias on EU issues and Al Jazeera has a lot of bias on Middle Eastern issues.