While the glory of the “unfollow” function on Facebook is becoming more and more apparent to me… nonetheless the amount of shared and reposted “news” articles, blogs, anecdotal stories, and opinions on current affairs is still getting way out of hand. At best, it’s just very annoying to have to scroll through, but at worst I’m very concerned that this warped means of acquiring knowledge of what’s going on in the world is in turn warping our perceptions and is dictating our decision-making when it comes to voting and the like. (Let alone the damage social media has been allowed to cause to friends and family because people just let loose on there with their own arrogant and holier-than-thou opinions – which while they’d never say to someone they love/know face-to-face, they don’t think twice of posting it online.) Most of the news articles I see being posted and shared are from unknown/unreliable sources anyways. From what I can tell, it seems like this is the primary means of staying up to date on what’s going on in the world and I don’t like it. I’d like to find some trustworthy and relatively balanced news sources who report the facts and don’t seek to further some political agenda. Most of the major news companies have quite liberal bends (CNN, NPR, NBC, etc.) and the only non-liberal major ones I’m aware of (Fox, Infowars) are fairly extreme and quite sensationalistic. How do folks around here stay informed? Do you know of trustworthy sources from which you learn about what’s happening in the news?

New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian and BBC are usually fairly reliable without extreme bias. Let's all keep in mind that reality does have a liberal bias though. As you said yourself, the right-wing "news" sources tend to be patently absurd dogshit like Fox News and worse.

Here's an infographic that provides a general idea of how the news is skewed which can be helpful.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eVpp15SC5a4/ ... raphic.jpg

And here's the original author's explanation of the infographic to give more of a background to it:

http://www.allgeneralizationsarefalse.com/?p=65

Agence France-Presse, Reuters and the BBC are about as politically disinterested and reliable as you can get; all three take great pains to be exclusively fact based. While I still read it on occasion, I have to say the New York Times veers ever closer to Establishment Democrat mouthpiece these days. WaPo still remains a good source, though.

Right on. Haha I beg to differ on reality's liberal lean... but we can let that sleeping dog lie hahahaha. Eh, the right-wing crap is just as stinky as the left. It's just that whatever side you happen to be on goes down a little smoother.



^Cool infographic; I love the idea behind it. LOL at NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR as "minimal partisan bias" though. The creator obviously a lot of thought, care, time, and energy into making it, though I disagree that sources were "heavily weighed" as unbiased due to whether or not they exist in print, on TV and radio, longevity, etc. Those might suggest higher levels of reputability, but I don't see what they have to do with bias.

I respect any news outlet that reports the facts without any bias, omissions, or outright falsehoods and distortions, and that discounts Fox News for me (sorry.) The thing is, sometimes the basic hard facts make one of the extreme political factions uncomfortable, and that news outlet gets unfairly tagged as "Liberal biased" or "Conservative biased" when no such bias exists. Yes stating the facts does often lead credence to the liberal viewpoint.... but not always!

And sometimes people interpret the facts to their own ends. Consider this basic statistic: the US has a higher percentage of its citizens incarcerated than any other country. Basic fact. The liberal media will say this is because the laws are too strict, the legal system is biased against minorities/poor people etc, and a lot people in prison don't really deserve to be there. The conservative media will say that statistic is simply proof that our legal system is the most efficient and effective at catching bad guys than, say, Mexico, where the incarceration rate is lower, but the violent crime rate is notably higher. Me- just give me the basic statistic and let me make my own conclusion.

What generally gets lost in these charts of media bias is the importance of individual journalists. People focus on the big-picture editorial slant and lose sight of the fact that even highly partisan environments can have golden nuggets of fact or wisdom. A perfect illustration of this is one of the best national security "behind the scenes" analysts around, John Schindler. He is the real McCoy, so to speak, a 15-year veteran of the NSA with a PHD in military history who knows how foreign policy really works. It's rare to see someone with both practical experience in intelligence and academic knowledge of it. He's written articles (and prolific tweets) about Trump and Russian intelligence for a long time before November 8th, along with other notable happenings in national security (eg Clinton's emails, developments in Syria, etc). Who does he write for? Well, for the last two years he has primarily written for the New York Observer. Yes, that paper, the one owned by Trump's son-in-law. If you went purely by infographics like the one Odovacar posted, you'd think "pro-Trump conservative trash" and end up missing some of the best-informed analyses of Trump's ties to Russian intelligence (spoiler: they're scathing).

If you're looking for just a basic rundown of the day's news, then yes, a fairly neutral source like Reuters or AP is fine. But if you want some sort of expert informed analysis on a particular subject, normally you will have to look elsewhere, and you won't be well-served by automatically dismissing a source because its editors skew hard-left or hard-right. Once you find those journalists and analysts, you can just go right to their articles and ignore everything else if the rest of what their bosses publish is trash.

Personally speaking, I tend to shop around a lot but I think my most-visited sources are Washington Post and Politico, followed by The Atlantic, Daily Beast, and New Yorker (along with anything by the aforementioned Schindler).

I've been wondering the same thing since I'm a massive noob when it comes to politics, as I just started getting into the damn thing. Al-Jazeera is absolute shite though. I read from multiple sources that The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times are fairly reliable and have minimal bias.

Yeah, I follow Christian Science Monitor and The Associated Press on Twitter. I've gotten rid of all of the other shit. I started systematically unfollowing everybody who started echo-chambering news stories on Twitter.

Except when there's something negative to report about India. Even if it's a kid scraping its knee playing tag. Anything negative to say about India will get Brits fired up. BBC News is my main news source, but I keep alternating between bemused bewilderment and annoyance at their India obsession.

Yeah, echoing Earthcubed's statement on individual journalists. I don't know too much about all of them to be honest, but, personally, when it comes to news about Russia, the growth of far-right populism etc., I always go for Anton Shekhovtsov and the Russia Without BS blog. I don't really focus on anything else, but I think Russia deserves some serious analysis from the rest of Europe lest it influences European far-right politicians to gain power.

BBC is usually my first to-go source as far as foreign news sites go. I also like The Economist.

One shouldn't take at gospel everything the news says, though. I guess reading several different websites on a certain matter is more advisable in case you want to know as much as possible since every side has their own version and usually the truth is is somewhere in the middle.

Russia Times, Pravda ru, New Eastern Outlook, gotcha covered.

Earthcubed is definitely right about the individual journalists. For example, the New York Times is fairly ok, but they keep letting complete hack shills like Dave Brooks and Tom Friedman stink up the opinion page.

Many good suggestions for keeping up with general world events in this thread so far. If you want more in depth coverage or analysis of particular kinds of news stories and events, you should look into blogs run by people with actual experience in what they are covering. As an example, sofrep is all written by ex-special forces people, so they are pretty knowledgeable and even handed about special forces/intelligence type news.

I watch a lot of secular talk radio and the young turks.

This.

And people seem to forget it's possible to be skeptical of [any] news, especially if it conforms to their preexisting views on a topic.

Also, news is a business and they report on what will get them the most views/best ratings.

This is why it annoys me when people say "why doesn't the news report on [some fluffy happy shit]?" Because that's not what will get them ratings.

The most accurate news site I've come across is RTnews. We Are Change is pretty good too. https://www.rt.com/usa/

Dats some gooood satire.

"Ukraine is literally Hitler!" - RT

Joking aside, the show with Assange is fun, even if it's obviously card-stacked as shit. Shame how they exploit anti-neoliberal leftist critics like Žižek to justify Russia's imperialism, too.

I wonder if miskatonic79 is also a fan of https://life.ru/

hmmmmm (if RT is the New York Times of Russia, life.ru is FOX. let that sink in for a moment.)

I was never fond of journalists, but it's pretty much to the point where I think they are all garbage.

I only use primary sources: an interview, transcripts, direct video, etc. I don't need to read someone else's spin to make up my mind. If I see a news story that doesn't have an actual primary source, I always take it with a grain of salt at best.

I've been watching almost nothing but CSPAN. It started As dry as it is, there's no interpretor doing any thinking or assessments for me. No pundits, no digests. Everything is archived and really well organized. You can just watch clips of an individual representative, or you can watch the entire unedited four hours of any of the confirmation hearings, for example. I really like it. I don't dig informational middle men.

As I was recently told, "You know you're an adult when you watch CSPAN on purpose."

Interesting topic.
I find this "problem" AMAZING (and worrying). Fake news, post truth and the degradation of news agencies (who just copy-paste, translate poorly and forget about the sources).
If you're interested in something, read about it as much as you can searching in Google (or DuckDuckGo) and looking for the sources.

The funniest are the people who think internet memes are reliable sources. So many times I've seen quotes being attributed to the wrong person on facebook. I'll never forget that time I saw a Winston Churchill quote being attributed to... Eminem.

Good topic. As has been mentioned already, all news is biased; the best any of us can do is try to use different sources and do our best to judge between them on specific issues. It's the exact same with, for example, history books: you want to learn about the history of a country, you better read more than one book. These days I spend as much time reading 'news critics' who point out lies, inaccuracies, biases and hypocrisy in the reports of various mainstream news sources. For example, you get a better idea of what's happening in Britain by reading 'Private Eye' than any paper.

And for what it's worth, the BBC's biases are painfully clear to any supporter of Scottish independence, so I personally wouldn't trust it very much when it covers the politics of any other country.

Joke post? Or are you one of Putin's astroturfers?

BBC and Wall Street Journal seem liked across the board basically.

I personally read the WSJ. They skew pretty conservative in editorials, but for actual reporting WSJ is excellent, and they cover a niche that most others don't cover as well.

There is no credible or trustworthy television news, because none of them make money delivering news, they make money entertaining people, and that skews their journalism. Also, relatively speaking, they all have very small newsrooms compared to even local NPR affiliates like WBUR. If you need assistance deciding whose entertainment and whose news, look at their budgets. Television "news" companies spend more on makeup, outfits, and visual effects than they do on the news. Doesn't mean they're bad, but just that they're entertainment, akin to the Kardashians, Jimmy Kimmell, or Star Wars.

There are people who trust the Huffington Post or Breitbart? I've tried to read both of them and they both read like they're secretly owned by The Onion.

I find it weird Aljazeera isn't trusted so much. Quite a lot of people in the Balkans here watch it somewhat regularly. I think it's a good source if you ignore the obvious bias in favour of Middle East-related conflicts like Israel-Palestine (even though I'm more supportive of Palestinian government than Israeli).

Because the only people in Qatar who wouldn't serve life in jail in a fuctioning legal system are expats?

Whether or not the news is fake or inflated one direction vs the other, I find the pop up ads the most annoying aspect of newspaper websites. Print has died a very slow death and this is an unfortunate side effect.

@droneriot No Qatari people in the regional version of Aljazeera here. I just watch it for the news in ex-Yugoslav countries, reported by well-known reporters from the Balkans.

Some even almost force you to turn off adblock. Also fuck those news sites that only allow you to read a couple of free articles and then ask you to sign up for a paid subscription. I guess since more and more people read the news online rather than buying newspapers they gotta find some other way to profit from people reading their online pages. This also contributes even more to the problem of people only leading the catchy/clickbait titles/headlines to news articles on facebook and thus actually misunderstanding the story due to some handpicked quote from someone.

Just use that new Soros-funded, Leftist-operated Correctiv thing. "Alternate fact checker." Totally unbiased!!

Their way to combat free news websites seemed to be "Let's make ours as unreadable as possible and still charge you" which has worked out greatly, obviously.

Most alarming thing about that graphic was that so many people trust comedy programs like The Daily Show and Colbert Report as news sources. Enjoying the shows and agreeing with their opinions is your business, that's fine; but to actually consider them to be your news sources? There must be something really wrong with the real news if they can't compete with literal fake news.

Also interesting that besides the Wall Street Journal, Fox News is the ONLY news source that conservatives trust that also gets trust from the mixed group. Every other news source trusted by conservatives is trusted only by conservatives.

Not surprising. Here in Kansas, republican party ideology exists in a hermetically sealed vacuum from which no information enters or escapes. It's not hatred of other opinions or sources of info, either, but indifference.

Jon Stewart was voted the USA's most trusted anchor for a few years in a row, if I'm not mistaken. A big reason why is that these shows would attack any political entity, no matter their party lines, for doing/saying something stupid. The scenario which brought this about is exactly as you're thinking it is: mainstream journalism is so pathetically partisan that it was refreshing to have a pair of comedians take both sides to task.

I was a big Daily Show fan around 2003-2005. That was when it began airing here. I started to lose interest in it once Stephen Colbert left and the rest of the supporting cast began slowly getting replaced. Not saying the following ones have been bad but I was used to the ones who were there when I started watching, know what I mean?

Jon and Colbert were my favourites followed by Lewis Black.

http://www.usasupreme.com

I find this news source to be unbiased and reliable.