Advanced Writing Composition class last Thursday really got me thinking about the influence of life experience and opinions in the news as well as within any forum that is considered to be "unbiased." Biased as defined by Dictionary.com includes a source that is "fair, equitable, tolerant, neutral." I began to think of examples of sources that meets this criteria, but I found myself hard pressed to find any. At first I thought of scientific and mathematical facts that are well known, but as a research these facts I discovered many of which were only presumed to be facts. An example of this is pretty much any mathematical equations. Numbers and equations, as I am still puzzled to consider, are not tangible and therefore not true, unbiased facts. Apparently for a fact to be unbiased a person with political, economic, and/or personal interests could not have discovered it, because this biased discovery would lead to a partial gain.
Does this mean all of the scientific and political minds who discovered such institutions as democracy and equations as E=mc^2 were just biased benefactors of their thoughts?
Then, I thought, surely location is an unbiased fact. Yet, who dictates where a countries boundaries end and begin. Do the resources of a country allocate where a boundary is? Then would not a boundary become a biased fact that was influenced by the judgment of man?
I suppose the idea of what is a biased and/or unbiased fact and portrayal has me quit puzzled and confused. I now file away stories I hear on the television or read on the web as news commentary rather than unbiased and impartial news.
--Nikki
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