I feel, "Is it better?" to be a fundamentally different question than "Is it a sign of integrity and clear-sightedness?"
I would agree it is better for the audience to be open about one's PoV. I just think that whether it shows integrity and clear sight depends on what that PoV actually is.
There are plenty of news sources that are open about what they are... but they are still trash with no integrity or understanding.
I think even those are
potentially clear-sighted at least (I'd need to see specific examples to judge) - if you can be honest about your mission and stick to it you can be, to my mind, clear-sighted. Even if your mission is something ethically questionable.
Re: integrity, the only question is the definition of integrity one uses. For me, integrity is about having a set of values, and sticking to them, even if people disagree with those values - indeed those values might be very antithetical to a lot of people. I think you can be pretty nasty and have integrity. There are some people who think integrity has to mean moral rectitude and righteousness but those are obviously subjective so I judge them relatively to their stated position.
What I think displays a complete and total lack of integrity are the wild double-standards, obvious contradictions, euphemistic writing, and so on that our mainstream media in the West are increasingly given to (it's always been an issue, but it's become a worse and worse over the last few decades), especially given the same organisations frequently claim to
be impartial, which is, I would argue, an actively corrupt claim when they are very clearly quite seriously partial (and I would distinguish the claim of
being impartial from the claim of
attempting to be impartial - the BBC and the NYT for example specifically claim that they actively, currently,
are impartial, not that they're merely
attempting it).
The BBC here in Britain is a good example - their primary defence against accusations of bias and partiality is "we get accused of that by the left and the right so we must be striking a balance", which is truly brain-damaged, because the main issue is they're biased strongly in favour of a specific world-view, one that is neither really left or right, but is absolutely a biased viewpoint nonetheless. They're also a superb example of an organisation with a partial attitude to people with a specific kind of social status and background - which is not actual aristocrats, note, but absolutely is the Oxbridge crowd (and I say that as someone who has a lot of friends and relatives who are part of said crowd, note), and very much against anyone definitively outside that. They're also wildly partial towards extractive industries and the military-industrial complex, and this is striking because they were far less partial to both say, 20 years ago, before the pretense of "impartiality" became the norm.
In fact I can go further and give a specific example of how pretending you don't have a PoV, pretending you're "impartial" can be absolutely poisonous and deeply corrupt. The BBC adopted this mantra of "impartiality" in the '00s (possibly 2004 specifically), and this meant that for a period of well over a decade, the BBC approached all climate-change discussions by insisting on bringing in
paid representatives (often actual lobbyists, PR people, etc.) of the fossil fuel industry and then insisted on treating them as if their views were as rational and important to air as the actual climate scientists (who they were treated as being "opposite" to). This gradually become more and more and more embarrassing and basically brought the BBC into disrepute, so they formally stopped doing it re: climate change in 2018. But they still do the same and worse re: other issues, claiming "impartiality" as the reason.
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