Measuring quality (narrow focus)

If we're going to distinguish between "baseline quality" and "featured quality", we're going to have to distinguish between "basically neutral" and "completely neutral".

A rigorous report might survey all the major economists on health care to come up with a fair weighting of perspectives. They would cover the different economic/ethical/political viewpoints, leave out some fringe views, and support it all with substantial data. If it was significant, they would give some weight to emerging perspectives, noting that it is a reasonable but frequently debated viewpoint. That's a completely neutral article. It achieves our highest standards of "NPOV".

That means that a basically neutral article might have systemic bias. It might be CNN's facile "here are two perspectives", with no supporting data to critically evaluate those perspectives, and no interest in a third or fourth perspective that doesn't fit neatly into the X vs Y storyline. "Liberals assert that public health care is the best way to cover everyone, but conservatives note that this would be costly." No economic studies about costs, economies of scale, pooled risk, monopsonies for pharmaceuticals, etc... If you're lucky, some anecdotes about a few people's bad experiences with different health care systems. I would never present this as an authoritative source about health care. But would it be basically neutral? Probably. (Unless someone cherrypicked CNN stories to prove a point).

I shudder to concede that it would be "basically neutral". But I think that's what we mean when we say "baseline standard". It's basically trustworthy, with a few asterisks* that would need to be expanded upon.