8 ms·

I'm hopeful that after the Washington Post hires the 5 dozen additional reporters it plans to add in 2017, readers will again see real investigative journalism.

• chrissnell 10y ago
  No doubt. I subscribed to WaPo in hopes of finding a politically neutral (or at least, balanced) paper that focused on real news and not political opinion and crap. The last year, however, has been dreadful for that paper. It feels like 80% of the first page of front page content has been anti-Trump opinion pieces. I want to read about the war in Syria, ISIS, finance, the American economy, and technology. This stuff should be the mainstay of any U.S. paper.
  • iscrewyou 10y ago
    Do you recommed another paper I can subscribe to that tries to reports more neutral?
    • oh_sigh 10y ago
      English version of al jazeera has good info on ISIS/Syria/North Africa. Not without it's own biases, but definitely more in depth topics than we get in western papers.
      • 464192002d7fe1c 10y ago
        al jazeera wears their biases on their sleeve, when I read something from them I know to read it with the understanding that its from the Qatar state-run media outlet. My primary issue with outlets like WaPo is that they pretend to be objective journalism while publishing rather blatant propaganda pieces. Same reason why I can (and do) read sites like breitbart, they don't pretend to be objective news sources.
        • angry-hacker 10y ago
          I sometimes watch their news channel, but not very often. Out of curiosity, can you point our their bias regarding Qatar? What kind of bias I should be aware of when watching them? I don't have time or interest to dig into Qatars politics, but maybe you can give some hints what to look forward, since you sound like someone who knows the deal.
    • chrissnell 10y ago
      I sure wish I had one to recommend. I asked this question on Facebook last year and got a bunch of good responses from some friends: * The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting) * Wall Street Journal * BBC * Christian Science Monitor
      • davidw 10y ago
        The Economist is not particularly left-leaning - they're quite in favor of free markets and a light regulatory touch for many things. The Financial Times is another good one.
        • muninn_ 10y ago
          I mostly agree, but I felt like they were bursting at the seams to criticize Trump. Hardly a piece on the site that I RECALL had anything positive to say about the Brexit, Trump, or other movements. I like to read positive and negatives for both. Overall, a good site/magazine.
          • snerbles 10y ago
            Better to say that The Economist is pro-globalism, right or left.
            • muninn_ 10y ago
              Yeah maybe that's more accurate, depending on what you mean by globalism.
            • mSparks 10y ago
              guess that depends on your definition of globalism. the economist is pro imf/world bank. that is less pro globalisation and more pro * poorer nations for the Western profit incentive. which isnt quite an equivalence.
            • gertef 10y ago
              Isofar as "left" and "right" have meaning, globalism is right, not left. A "left" globalism would be an international workers/labor movement, which Economist does not support.
    • eterm 10y ago
      Try Al Jazeera English. It's not completely without bias (no one is, especially the BBC running scared of their own shadow post-Hutton), but it is a good place to find other points of view and shows some incredible documentaries and highlights some stories from around the world that western news channels just ignore either because of cost, because they are beholden to corporate sponsors or because it's just not entertaining enough. As with the BBC, having state sponsorship can actually work well to provide funding to fill in the gaps that market-driven news leaves behind. Yes, it happens that the country sponsoring Al Jazeera is a piece of shit for human rights and democracy but this isn't reflected in the output of AJE which feels like it has a good degree of editorial independence. It's not Russia Today by any means.
      • x3n0ph3n3 10y ago
        So state propaganda sources are better and make you feel like you know something? Got it.
      • throwaway122916 10y ago
        Al Jazeera is anti-Israel and Anti-Russia for the most part because of Qatar's foreign policy interests. BBC is anti-Russia, but more neutral on other issues.
        • pjc50 10y ago
          News sources that don't get described as "anti-Israel and Anti-Russia" are almost certainly untrustworthy. The question is whether they also are willing to cover the west negatively where appropriate too.
          • throwaway122916 10y ago
            Sure. Like Saudi Arabia, Arab Emirates and Ukraine. When all of those have negative stories about them I'm sold.
          • linkregister 10y ago
            Haaretz and Moscow Times often post stories critical of their governments' actions. I know it's easier to make blanket statements to form an effective filter in the modern deluge of information, but it's not enough. I guess there are worse optimizations to make.
    • mtgx 10y ago
      I would say The Intercept is pretty "neutral" - but less in the "we don't take anyone's or anything's side, ever" (a mantra the NYT also abandoned in 2012, because it found it lacking - like with climate change, etc) sense, and more in the "holding government (whichever it may be) accountable for wrongdoing" sense, which I think is the original purpose of the media (or at least the purpose most democracies attribute to the media, even if that's not true in many cases anymore). I thought this article described rather well the main problem with the media today and how it could get back on the right path: https://popehat.com/2016/12/15/deserving-trust/ https://popehat.com/2016/12/15/deserving-trust/ The mainstream media is just as responsible for the rise of fake news as anything else, if not more so. If it didn't give people a reason to distrust it as acting not out of principle, but out of love for a certain faction of the government, perhaps fake news wouldn't be such an issue today, because most people would keep reading the same mainstream press, knowing they can trust it.
      • gertef 10y ago
        The Intercepts' bias is in unfair credibility-undermining attacks. Being anti-everything is a cute gimmick, but not great news. It's still narrative-first, not evidence-first.
    • BurningFrog 10y ago
      I'm skeptical about trying to find perfect neutrality. Getting reporting (and opinion) from several different POVs seems better to me. It's a fair amount of effort though. Foreign papers are a good way to get a different perspective. Especially important when the topic is US foreign policy. I like British and Australian ones. I wish I had a sane US conservative media outlet to recommend. Surely there is one? For the libertarian angle on current events, reason.com is a decent substitute. But that's mostly opinion, not news reporting.
    • cm2187 10y ago
      The FT is probably the most serious, neutral, fact checked newspaper you can find. And if you read it frequently enough, there will always be articles that try to explain basic concepts to the non initiated. I'd say it's worth making it a daily read for 6 months. I find the Economist very politically motivated and stopped reading it.
      • gertef 10y ago
        FT (Financial Times) is the best news organization in the English-speaking world at the moment, in the realm of mainstream topics that catch the whole world's interest. (There are lots of important niche areas that FT ignores.) It is expensive, $6/week or $10/week (I don't know the meaning of the difference between their standard and premier access levels), but definitely worthwhile if you share with a whole household or coffeeshop.
        • cm2187 10y ago
          The difference is Lex, a special type of columns. Some readers live and die by Lex. I am less convinced myself of the value added given the price difference.
      • wahern 10y ago
        I agree. The South China Morning Post (scmp.com) is also worth taking a look at it, especially now that it's free. It's not quite the same caliber as the FT and it has less coverage of American news, but it's even further removed from Anglo-American media circles so offers an interestingly detached perspective while still speaking a familiar political and social language. I just recently renewed my FT subscription, though, after I let it lapse. I had dropped it favor of a SCMP subscription a couple of years ago. The FT price increases were relentless. But I never ended up reading the SCMP much and didn't even realize it had become free until recently. FT lowered their rates slightly, and given recent events I decided to start reading it again. I'm hesitant to call the FT neutral, though. Their journalistic culture is closer than most to the traditional Anglo-American laissez-faire descriptivist business culture (borderline amoral) that most Anglophone outlets moved far away from long ago. (In all fairness, they moved away from it partly because that culture was and still is often times dangerously indistinguishable from complicity wrt slavery, apartheid, authoritarianism, etc.) It's honest but still elitist. Perhaps being elitist is what has allowed it to stay above the fray better than other outlets like the Wall Street Journal or the Economist. The FT is also de facto internationalist given it's readership and industry focus, which is why so many commenters in their forums seem to presume they're anti-Brexit. (Also, when did their forums get so popular? Returning after a couple of years, it feels like the newspaper equivalent of Eternal September.) I guess those things have made them effectively largely neutral on a wide range of topics of interest, especially to American readers. But it also means the FT doesn't do serious investigate reporting, or to analyze issues very deeply, outside of industry pieces. I like to think of the FT as a reflection of the consensus opinion (or lack of opinion, as the case may be) among the international elite. And that reflection doesn't make a lot of sense unless you bring a lot of pre-existing knowledge to the table, including an already decent awareness of historic and current events, and the intellectual culture of that elite. (Which is definitely not the same as the culture of the academic elite, although there's significant overlap.) To understand what I mean about the FT being elitist and internationalist, people unfamiliar with the FT should know that it's common for high-level politicians like Secretaries of State, Foreign Secretaries, and even Prime Ministers and Presidents; and for powerful businessmen with multinational interests to publish commentaries through the FT knowing that they're quickly reaching an international audience with many in similarly powerful positions as themselves. In order to remain such a neutral outlet the FT is purposefully often very restrained in how they approach various topics. As I insinuated above, occasionally that restraint comes across more as stilted analysis, an awkward omission, or even deafening silence.
  • linkregister 10y ago
    The Washington Post's investigative reporting is fantastic, while its opinion writing is shrill and barely informative. I think the reason for the sudden prominence of negative Trump coverage was to address serious backlash the Washington Post was receiving. The Washington Post and other newspapers were giving enormous amounts of free media coverage to the Trump campaign up until the Republican National Convention. The Washington Post overcompensated by deluging readers with opinion pieces to overcome this criticism. I hope that the interest in opinion pieces will wane, but we will see.
• cninja 10y ago
  This isn't a puff piece. This is an advertisement for the calendar.
• mtgx 10y ago
  Washington Post became so profitable in 2016 because of the constant Trump bashing (deserved or not, but that's not the point here), so mainly from opinion pieces, not "investigative journalism".
• droopybuns 10y ago
  Is it an opinion piece? I felt it crossed the threshold for being a native advertisement.
• stuart78 10y ago
  I think Washington Post did the best job of any major national newspaper this year (at least in the second half) in terms of investigative Trump-related journalism. Puff-ish piece about his coverage (so you know its true): https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/david-fahrenthold-tells-the-behind-the-scenes-story-of-his-year-covering-trump/2016/12/27/299047c4-b510-11e6-b8df-600bd9d38a02_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_farenthold-850a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.9b021c63d6d6 https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/david-fahr...