I know that bias cannot be eliminated, but it can be minimized. That is the perogative.
Let's say you run a newspaper that has to report on 50 different stories every day. A large fraction of these stories involve the moral plights of two or more aggrieved parties. Any moral stance you take inevitably skews the perception of the story, when the reader has the responsibility for forming an opinion without it being tilted by anything other than the facts. Sticking to the facts of the story is paramount. Taking a moral stance is a shortcut- an easy way to excite your crowd and get them addicted to more high-adrenaline reporting.
>Equating two sides when they are starkly different is not neutral and reporting the facts.
Sticking to the facts is not the same as equating the two sides. Neutrality in reporting is connoted with sticking to the facts.
>If you truly believe this is the case, please get outside of whatever bubble you are living in and see how other people think.
The practices I am recommending are (part of) an antidote to the failure modes of how people think. Yellow journalism is on an uptick because of social media- the most emotional news stories are the most viral ones. There's a reason that they teach best practices for media objectivity in grade school. To hopefully constrain our emotions enough to make good judgements and decisions about the events we read about.
People that make fun of NYTimes's neutrality seem to prefer a world where the Huffington Post, a slew of shared facebook news reports, and the Drudge Report dominate the news outlets. Is this the world you want?
Let's go back into the story to discuss:
>The two sides no longer seem to recognize each other’s concerns.
The GGP highlighted this quote as being ridiculously neutral. I imagine you would call this "equating the two sides". When I read it in the context of violent protest, I took it to mean that they are not communicating through any other means than violence, i.e. there are not currently productive talks between the two sides.