8 ms·

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.
      • davidw 10y ago
        > I felt like they were bursting at the seams to criticize Trump Could be, there's a reason for that. With some things, the two sides do not really merit the same consideration. Slavery, for instance is an easy one, not something where you need 'fair and balanced' coverage of 'both sides of the issue'. Not comparing Trump to slavery, mind you, but from their editorial stance, he combines a number of worryingly illiberal qualities that are antithetical to their position. They were (and are) the same way about Silvio Berlusconi, despite not having a lot in common with some of his past left-wing opposition.
  • toyg 10y ago
    It's a sad state of affairs when the Economist, the mouthpiece of globalized freemarketeer elites, can be nonchalantly branded "left-leaning". Left of whom, Darth Vader?
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • Analemma_ 10y ago
      Left of Brietbart, which is now the standard template for the right. Overton window, ho!
  • vostok 10y ago
    I can see how the Economist might be described as liberal by a European, but they are decidedly not left-leaning. I would say that they are right-leaning even by American standards.
    • mc32 10y ago
      Mostly they are pro free trade free enterprise more than right wing, left wing. So when the left is pro trade, it would appear they are left leaning, when their position coincides with right aisle politics, they appear right wing. In other words, economics colours their perspective rather than politics but it can appear to be the opposite.
  • intrasight 10y ago
    Great suggestions of course. I too take issue with calling The Economist "left-leaning". If you'd have said "liberal" (as in Liberal Democracy) I would accept that.
  • aleph_naught 10y ago
    > The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting) The Economist's mission statement is, almost literally, to advance neoliberal (unrelated to the canonical American definition of 'liberal') thought and policies across the globe. Any further to the right, and you would be in the territory of Mises/Friedman/Hayek, with privatized roads and 'gold standards'.
    • eterm 10y ago
      We live in a time when people who are to the right of Reagan are at times described un-ironically as "liberal". It concerns me that people can consider the economist "left-leaning", it shows how far to the right the U.S. (and with it much of the world) has shifted. The U.S. was way ahead of the rest of the world on this, and has always been a lot more conservative than Europe, but it's cultural influence has had the effect of moving Europe to the right by painting the middle ground as "left wing" so Europe makes concessions on things like privatisation of infrastructure (e.g. for better or worse privatisation of telecommunications in Europe in the 80s was pushed by the US). It hasn't been all bad of course, part of the reason the recent election result is so painful is because progressive poltics has made a huge amount of progress. In 25 years the US has gone from racist, homophobic and dealing with the effects of prohibition (the "war on drugs") to the society we have now which is dealing with it's issue of race far better than Europe (which continues to bury it's head in the sand over the issue), allowing gay marriage, serving in the military regardless of (open) sexual preference, and de-criminalising or legalising cannabis. The US has faced up and is dealing with it's racism problem. Europe always saw itself as "nowhere near as bad as the US", which was true when the US had lynchings. And there is still plenty of work to the done in the US particularly around the justice system and other institutional effects which lead back to social injustice. But the trajectory is there for the US, while in Europe it feels like racism is a growing problem which isn't being tackled at all. So it's understandable that people who were already set in their ways 25 years ago (indeed many current voters were approaching retirement 25 years ago) see the modern world and react with horror at all the progress. Trump said he's going to "win so much we'll be sick and tired of winning", well Trump isn't a winner, progressives should be shouting that Trump is weak if he's tired of winning because he's won an election or two, because progressives have been winning for 25 years and we're not going to get tired of winning any time soon. So the dramatic shift to the right has to been in context. The sky isn't going to fall but while huge progress has been made on social issues; on issues such as economic policy, policing and commercial rights there has been a slow constant erosion and shift to the right. So the shift to the right socially is dangerous because reversing canoe from paddling upstream against a right-wing under-current will act as an enabler where you can quickly find yourself in shit creek without a paddle.
  • lb1lf 10y ago
    > * The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting) -With all due respect, calling The Economist left-leaning makes about as much sense as calling Marx a right deviationist. On the assumption that your comment is sincere - what would, in your book, be an example of a neutral or even right-leaning newspaper? (I am genuinely curious)
  • BurningFrog 10y ago
    The word everyone is looking for here is "libertarian".
    • davidw 10y ago
      Even that's not a perfect fit, though, as they support things like gun control that would send many libertarians in the US into fits of sputtering rage.
• 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.