12 ms·

For Two Months, I Got My News from Print Newspapers

133 points by coloneltcb 9y ago

walrus01 9y ago
I would encourage US residents who want a more balanced view of world events to read a mixture of the largest international, english language, online news portals/papers which are not published in the US: UK: Guardian UK: The Independent CA: The Globe and Mail (generally centrist), The National Post (generally right of center). PK: Dawn, The Daily Times IN: Times of India SG: Straights Times AU: Sydney Morning Herald
- Tomte 9y ago
  For DE: Spiegel Online (not the real Spiegel, but they obviously share many articles with the mothership): http://www.spiegel.de/international/ http://www.spiegel.de/international/ Zeit: http://www.zeit.de/english/index http://www.zeit.de/english/index
  - walrus01 9y ago
    Not print media, but I find that the English language documentaries and news from DW are generally well balanced. They're certainly a lot closer to the CBC than they are to fox, msnbc, NBC, etc.
nindalf 9y ago
Eliminating notification spam sounds great and reading daily newspapers sounds great, but I've tried another variant of this with some success. Reading just the weekly version of the Economist left me vast amounts of free time and I didn't feel any less informed than when I was reading several sources over the course of a day. Of course, that's my own estimation of how well informed I was, so that might be far from accurate.
- mFixman 9y ago
  I go open step below that: most of my news comes from The Economist and similar weekly newspapers, but I also keep notification spam for important news from the BBC, which is mostly unbiased. I'm glad I know about yesterday's resignation of one of Trump's economic aides, but I don't spend valuable minutes trying to find everyone's opinions about its consequences.
- davidw 9y ago
  I used to get by on The Economist and a smattering of online news. It works pretty well, but not so much for a world that feels like it's moving really quickly. For instance: https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/971209163115253760 https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/971209163115253760 This week: Nunberg subpoenaed, couldn’t stop blabbing; Kellyanne said to have violated ethics law; Carson realized HUD’s complicated; Cohn quit, over tariffs not anti-Semitism; Guy from UAE who knows stuff, cooperating w/Mueller; Trump tweeted there’s no chaos; It’s only Tuesday. ... and she wrote that before the news broke about the porn star suing Trump about their hush agreement/money inked in the weeks before the election. I subscribed to the Washington Post via Amazon for national coverage, and I also get my local paper for their coverage of things like city council meetings, which actually make a lot more differences in our day to day lives than a lot of national issues.
  - rubidium 9y ago
    Why do you desire to be connected to that world?
    - davidw 9y ago
      Because I live in the US, and this stuff matters, one way or the other.
      - ghotli 9y ago
        I don't mean to pick on you specifically, because I'm sure you have your reasons for saying "this stuff matters". However, I am curious of what the value is of staying that up to date in the news cycle other than dopamine hits. Seems more like an addiction to stay that on top of the news cycle than a more measured approach like the weekly economist digests posited above.
        davidw 9y ago
        The Economist just doesn't cover everything that's going on. Realistically, any one of us could ignore most news and be fine, but I feel that it's part of our job as citizens to be informed and aware. I also feel that it's worth kicking in some money to the people doing the journalism that's uncovering important stuff. Look at the Roy Moore stuff that got uncovered, for instance. That was the election right there.
- detritus 9y ago
  I'm a big fan of The Economist and have bought and/or subscribed to it pretty much continuously for almost twenty years now (young old man that i am), but unless you're entirely beholden to its agenda, which I find very un-self-questioning - I'd suggest you offset its perspective with a 'complementary adversarial' weekly. Last time I swore off excess media consumption (about a decade ago) I kept on with The Economist and found I was 'drinking the Kool Aid' after a while.
  - bryananderson 9y ago
    What would you recommend as a good complement to The Economist?
    - detritus 9y ago
      To be honest, I'm not sure of a competing one-stop shop - I certainly didn't know when I last fasted from media. These days I do a daily scan of all the none-too-tabloidy newspapers (UK-based here), and on a weekly-or-so basis take in the likes of The Spectator, National Review and Foreign Affairs. - edit: I'm not going to lie - I could probably do with another breather - I'm unsure how much value I get from scouring all this crap.
    - smacktoward 9y ago
      If you're looking for an explicitly adversarial complement, Jacobin might fit the bill: https://jacobinmag.com/ https://jacobinmag.com/ (Though it's quarterly rather than weekly, of course)
    - thinkingemote 9y ago
      Newstatesman in the UK for a left wing weekly, politics centred periodical with minimal arts section and the book reviews are essentially ideological articles. the Spectator is more popular and a Tory/ right wing weekly with almost half of it devoted to culture, books, arts etc. I found the arts component of the Spectator to be relatively free of ideology. Recently I bought both and compared them. I found the writing quality in the newstatesman to be more variable, with a few Excellent and a few utterly awful articles. The Spectator is overall of good quality but nothing really stood out.
SpeciesInvader 9y ago
After reading the Black swan (Taken), I stopped reading every news outlet and did my best to not know up to the minute news. Like the author, I've felt more informed and able to make better decisions and hold better conversations because I'm not bombarded by constantly changing "facts". In fact, I feel liberated and but inundated with microscopic thoughts, but instead more general ideas. YMMV.
- busterarm 9y ago
  Very similar story here. I straight up miss some things, but nothing truly important. I've been spending more time deepening my career skills and the payoff versus being "on top of" current events has been enormous. tl;dr: Focus on what matters.
- ribosometronome 9y ago
  >I've felt more informed Sounds like you also run the risk of making Dunning–Kruger as a lifestyle choice.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
deadmetheny 9y ago
>print media old guard releases article stating that print media is good and totally better than digital Just more of the inevitable pushback from a dying industry's attempts to keep itself relevant. (also, why the downvotes, this is obvious propaganda)
- cokernel 9y ago
  I didn't downvote — and talking about downvotes just invites more — but the faux-quote summary you provide in your comment is inaccurate. A more accurate summary, provided in the article, is "Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social." The author explicitly rejects the claim you are imputing to him: "You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news." The whole article, as I understood it, was about the deeper understanding you can gain about a situation if you take things slow, in batches, instead of seeking to read and post shallow reactions quickly.
  - to3m 9y ago
    In my view the faux-quote is entirely accurate as a characterisation, if not as a summary.
  - deadmetheny 9y ago
    >The author explicitly rejects the claim you are imputing to him: "You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news." This isn't really pushed until the very end of the article, and it's not nearly as long as the rest. It feels very much like an inclusion mostly to appear unbiased. >A more accurate summary, provided in the article, is "Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social." I agree with this sentiment overall. Though, that is a quote the author of the column is echoing from someone else. Doesn't change that it's good advice, of course.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  People are probably downvoting you in part for your use of 'meme arrows'
  - 9y ago
rock8y 9y ago
I started getting WSJ April last year and read it everyday now. Saves me a lot of time and got me back into reading books, set a target of 24 for the year.
toasterlovin 9y ago
Wikipedia has a current events portal. I think it's a pretty decent way to stay abreast of events without falling prey to the outrage cycle. Basically, nothing shows up on there unless it is significant enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry. That may not be the perfect filtering criteria, but it's world better than the algorithm that decides what ends up on the front page of Google News. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
- tboyd47 9y ago
  I use /r/neutralnews for this purpose. I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. It seems like an unfilled niche.
  - dagw 9y ago
    I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. Sounds like you're looking for Reuters.
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      There are a ton of professional news outlets with expressed commitment to political neutrality. Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral.
      - toasterlovin 9y ago
        Disagree. I think people want to be able to believe that their news sources are neutral. But I don't think they actually want their news sources to be neutral. That's the genius of what news has become: entertainment that justifies itself by allowing you to feel like you are doing your duty as a citizen by keeping up with current events.
legitster 9y ago
I'm in my 20s and used to read the local paper religiously. It is nice and relaxing, but reasons I quit: - Portability: I did most of my reading on public transit. Hauling around a huge packet to read definitely made me feel like an old person. - Quanitity: It was really tough disposing of the quantity of paper. If you skipped a day for whatever reason, the papers could really start piling up. I tried to end weekend service (the massive advertising packets that contained no news), and sales basically laughed me away. - Lack of news: So much of the paper was throwaway lifestyle stuff. - Pricing: It starts out cheap, but afterward they kind of lock you in.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  I ended up meeting in the middle. I have a Sunday-only subscription with the New York Times. I get a physical paper on Sunday and the rest of the week I have access to the replica edition included (which is the print edition, just available through the PressReader app) - I have a 12.9" iPad Pro I read said replica edition on which gets me as close to the experience of reading a broadsheet as possible considering I'm still reading on a screen. Yeah, my promo discount just ended so instead of ~$20/mo it's costing me $40/mo - but I value having a condensed, well curated collection of relevant news articles so the cost is easily justified for me.
  - cgb223 9y ago
    How is their app for reading on? I've heard a lot of people complain about these proprietary digital reading apps for various magazines, papers etc
    - snuxoll 9y ago
      PressReader on mobile is pretty decent, there are tons of free sample papers and magazines available you can give a try to get a feel for it to see if it's your thing or not. There's some annoying hiccups with the NYTimes replica edition that bug me, if you pull up the text-view of an article that's on the front page and continued elsewhere you'll often get just the continuation instead of the full article (I don't know who to blame here, it's not deal-breaking but it is annoying) - but in general scrolling and paging around feels good, the app always downloads content to your device so offline viewing is there 100% of the time and the interface is workable. One other little nuisance is you can't link your NYTimes replica edition account to your existing PressReader account, so you have to manage them separately and sign into both (which the app allows, fortunately). Overall, would recommend, but give it a try before you commit to spending any money.
johnzim 9y ago
I do this to! I adore the Times http://thetimes.co.uk http://thetimes.co.uk although it requires a subscription. Their editor despises group think so you will always find dissenting and differing viewpoints as well as excellent reporting to the standard you'd expect of one of the oldest still published Newspapers in the world. Crucial to this was my decision to quit Twitter. I became significantly less anxious after leaving. It's impossible to avoid the constant bombardment of 'news' on that service.
character0 9y ago
The NYT has a newspaper option: https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper Not perfect, but it can definitely help eliminate some of the noise.
throwawaymanbot 9y ago
I Miss papers... No hysterical inflammatory comment section... just news.
graeme 9y ago
I have a print subscription to the weekend edition of the financial times, and I love it. It's quite fast to browse compared to online articles. You can skim a page and quickly see which articles are interesting. And uyou may read things you wouldn't have read online, as it's easy to glance past a headline and read a paragraph of an unfamiliar story.
- Tomte 9y ago
  When I had a weekly newspaper subscription, I didn't just skim, but stress out about what I 'had' to read or 'should' read. Real paper feels graver and more important to me than the web. Same with both Harper's and Lapham's Quarterly, which I really should read some day. Them now being two years old.
- DrScump 9y ago
  Print is great for browsing/scanning and reading. Online is better for clipping/saving/forwarding/referencing. For example, I have digital-only subscriptions to a couple of papers, but I prefer to do an initial scan of the print editions.
SomeHacker44 9y ago
Great, great article, thank you for sharing. For well over a decade I read the Economist cover to cover, every week, during my commute. At some point I started working from home and dropped the habit, and took up reading the NYT on-app when my commute resumed. The NYT apps all suck, IMO, because they do not reflect the print paper. The WSJ, however, has the print paper in digital form and I like it much better, but do not care for their spin and analysis. I found the Economist's take on the news to be somewhere between these two local New York papers and preferred it, but the digital version for whatever reason left me nonplussed. I wonder if there is a US news weekly akin to the Economist, with a good mix of news and analysis, with a well defined bias/opinion so that you're not left guessing what their perspective/slant is.
- ghaff 9y ago
  >I wonder if there is a US news weekly akin to the Economist, with a good mix of news and analysis, Not really. There used to be the weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report). Time is still hanging in there. But it's a pale shadow of its former self and was never either as deep or as broad as the Economist is.
imagetic 9y ago
I bought myself the NYT Sunday edition in print for 2017. If they could fix their subscription model I would have kept it, but after a year it doubled in price and customer support gave me flashbacks of trying to deal with AOL. I started reading the news in print because it was less stressful and I needed to train myself not to open the news each time I fired up a browser. The online papers put the opinion and doomsday headlines all over the place and I just needed to read a refined source of news that had time to be digested before it was published. The Washington Post has been a surprisingly good source of news over the last year as well. I prefer it over the NYT at this point and wish I could get it in print where I live. Aside from the many far leaning online sources, my general rule of thumb is just to avoid anything that is linked to TV. When CNN figures out how to rewind to 1990, I might change my mind. But print allowed me to take a moment and digest the news. Online was almost always in a state of panic, especially over the last year.
- twothamendment 9y ago
  I loved AOL support! Every time I tried to cancel they would give me 1, 2 or 3 months more for free. As for pricing, my local paper charges more for a digital subscription that to deliver a paper to my house. Subscription models are messed up.
  - reaperducer 9y ago
    >As for pricing, my local paper charges more for a digital subscription that to deliver a paper to my house. Subscription models are messed up. It's because print advertising is still more effective than digital. We've been hearing for more than a decade that this will change any day now, but it hasn't happened yet. And the more people use ad blockers, the longer it will remain true.
- flomo 9y ago
  I signed up for a NY Times Sunday subscription because at the time it was roughly the same price as the full-access digital subscription, but the price has gone up over time. However, I find the print edition is a much better experience than the digital platforms. Mostly because I can simply ignore the mostly awful editorial section or things that are buried in eg Style, whereas on the site and app those pieces are mixed-in with the news, giving the appearance of bias. Also, there are often pieces which appear on page A6 of the newspaper which are buried on the website, so you get a very different view of the news with the actual paper.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jccalhoun 9y ago
When I was in grad school the college gave people newspapers to read. So for a few years I read USA Today and the NY Times regularly. There is no way I would ever pay for a newspaper subscription. Most times there was nothing in them I cared about or hadn't heard about. Why should I pay for a sports section when I don't care about sports? Why should I pay for an arts section in the NY Times that is all about plays and events that are only playing in New York which is several hundred miles away?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Bundling is a form of risk management in which a publisher bets that the collective value of a bundle will be of greater interest to a large population than any disaggregated set. There are problems when certain portions of that bundle dominate the product, and are not what you care for (sport being a disinterest you and I share). Worse if sport intrudes other sections of the production -- I'm familiar with a print source in which it may be found on the front page, multiple times within the front section, periodically on the Op Ed pages (though those are otherwise almost wholly lacking in interest or information already), business, real estate, entertainment, .... I'd be happy if it were simply restricted to one section which I could then discard with no regrets. Your criticism of the Times's culture coverage is one I share. I've strongly suggested that at the least a regional substitute be offered such that local offerings elsewhere within the US -- say, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle -- be offered print subscribers in those areas. The Times is close to being a reasonable alternative to any local publication, though this also poses concerns....
Clubber 9y ago
The news in general is so awful these days. It's gotten to the point where I rarely read the comments section because I already know exactly what the majority of the audience's opinion is. I know what Rush Limbaugh's audience thinks before I read it, and I know what WaPo's audience thinks before I read it. That's evidence of a pretty serious herd mentality.
neverartful 9y ago
Good article. The author suggests that news in print is accurate. I believe that more times than not, it is more accurate than online news. However, it does not eliminate bias. I get my news online by scanning CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC. I view ALL news as being biased (online or print) and by looking at several sources I figure that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Some other benefits of printed news (even if still biased): the ads in print stay where they are. They don't hover over the article I'm trying to read and force the reader to click 'X'. They don't start playing video clips. They don't have ads switching in and out and moving around. Print also has no way of tracking what I read.
- asldkfjalsdkfj 9y ago
  I have the same view of "the truth is in the middle." I supplement my news with itar-tass, xinhua, and irna to calibrate my view globally. It's also an exercise of learning what ways other people view the world. How can you understand someone that only gets information from one channel if you don't know what that channel is saying?
  - polskibus 9y ago
    Dialectics is a proven ancient method for gathering information. I agree it is very useful when you've got the time. However, the sheer volume of today's information means that nobody has time for that in most cases.
- superhuzza 9y ago
  Personally, I outright disregard a large number of sources - There's so much rubbish online that the 'middle ground' is extremely unlikely to be the truth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
- emodendroket 9y ago
  > I get my news online by scanning CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC. I view ALL news as being biased (online or print) and by looking at several sources I figure that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Frankly, these are all sources which don't disagree with each other very much, fundamentally.
jontayesp 9y ago
I want to add another suggestion - try a podcast like “The Daily” from NYT. It’s about 20 minutes long per episode, and covers one or two of the most important issues of the day. It’s a more human/meaningful experience for me, because you hear the voices of people who are directly affected by the news (such as the students from parkland). It adds an emotional depth, and I feel like I can stay up to date with current events without mindlessly scanning dozens of articles. The host, Michael Barbaro, is fantastic and pleasant to listen to. Give it a try!
- nas 9y ago
  Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I listen to and enjoy "The Daily" as well. However, I dislike the "human interest" stories. I would prefer it to be an unemotional summary of the previous days news. I'm not a robot and I don't hate humans. ;-) However, I feel like those kind of stories can trick you into making illogical decisions. I.e. "think of the children" argument for some new policy. It is a trend in news that I dislike. I think they are trying to make the news more engaging but I think it is leading to poorer decision making.
dismal2 9y ago
The medium is the message
postit 9y ago
I bought a subscription of Die Zeit by mistake one year ago. It arrives by post every Thursday and I'm always surprised by the quality of the articles (even if my German isn't that good). Compared to the online counterparts, they are deep and even present several points and vision of the same subject. The best example was a article where they divided the page in two columns, and two different authors explained their points about the immigration crisis.
confounded 9y ago
> After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad. This was also my experience of similar experiments and introspections.
fluxem 9y ago
For two months, I didn't read any news and nothing happend. Reading news that doesn't affect you or you do something about it is a waste of time.
vinceguidry 9y ago
Print requires taking time out of your day. Online consumption can be mixed in with whatever else you're doing that day. I think that's the real reason only old people read the paper these days. Content doesn't matter as much as packaging sometimes.
Bromskloss 9y ago
Do you need to actively follow the news at all?
lostphilosopher 9y ago
I've done similar experiments with tweaking my media diet. I haven't found something that seems right, but I have determined a couple things that I want. My ideal news source would: 1. Not be speculative. I want to know what happened and what it meant/means, not what it might mean, or what might happen next. 2. Not involve PR people. I already know exactly what they're going to say, and why they're going to say it, they've brought me no value. Bring me either the newsmaker themselves, or someone who has at least the _possibility_ of being neutral-ish. 3. Never auto-play anything or force me to dismiss an add. Yay print on that front. :-)
- p33p 9y ago
  I honestly enjoy Axios as a starter for news. They are relatively unbiased, gives me what I need to know, and tells me why it's important. If something has peaked my interest more, I'll turn towards WaPo, NYT, etc for further in depth analysis. Have you looked at Axios before?
  - lostphilosopher 9y ago
    I haven't, but I'll give it a go. :-)
dredmorbius 9y ago
I'm of mixed minds on this. The online world can be (and quite often is) an extraordinarily bad information source, and compounds numerous limited-attention dynamics. At the same time, both print and broadcast media sources seem to be markedly worse, even the "best" of these. I find numerous national broadcasters (BBC, CBC, Australian ABC, PBS, NPR) almost completely unlistenable, despite decades of previous exposure. I'm not sure if they're getting markedly worse, or my own discernment has changed, though I suspect bits of both. Some print sources are reasonably good, and The Economist, the Financial Times, and The New York Times are better than most. Many other print sources are execrably bad: Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the print dailies of most major U.S. cities, or papers such as USA Today. They are irrelevant, uninformative, distracting, and information-poor. They're not notably prone to yellow-journalism incitement, which is almost worse: they're both bad AND uninteresting. Print is no guarantee of quality, only of delay. My preferred sources: Long-form media programmes. On the Media (WNYC), Fresh Air (WHHY), The World (WBUR), and Paul Kennedy's Ideas (CBC) are my regular beat. With the exception of The World (a news magazine), each typically offers longer-form presentation, with 1-4 segments per hour, or roughly 10-15 minutes of treatment on a topic, minimum. Many are weekly, which required discarding a great deal of information that doesn't fit the hour. Each is pre-recorded, which is to say, well edited. That last point is a particular disappointment with the BBC and NPR news magazines particularly: as they've shifted from a generally pre-recorded (sometimes by several days, though often by only a few hours or even minutes) format to live, the glitches of live broadcast have imposed themselves rudely and distractingly. I particularly noted this during the Boston Marathon bombing coverage in which the BBC attempted to have live, on-the-street coverage of the manhunt, which ended up mostly being an on-the-air troubleshooting of low-quality audio conveying low-density information (largely zero or none). The product of the 1990s may have sacrificed a slight bit of timeliness, but was vastly more relevant, prepared, and polished. OTM's look at the alt-right and racism, this past week, was a particularly excellent instance and an exemplar of the class. Books. There are materials which are simply best obtained from domain experts who've had months, or years, or decades to digest and present a concept. Oddly enough, there's a counterpoint to haw fast-moving present events are in that the timeless and ageless themes seem more important. Wikipedia. For long-developing and complex stories, it is vastly superior in information delivery to a daily broadcast or print format, or even a weekly digest. Selected online sources. Hewing to high-quality, and away from anything in the least sensationalistic. I add crap sources to my router's blocklist with impunity. Disconnecting. Mostly I actively go out of my way to avoid ongoing distraction. I'm managing to remain reasonably informed, though that may of course be my own confirmation biases showing.
ThomPete 9y ago
After the latest election, I got seriously disillusioned by how the media had covered political issues. I constantly had a very different reading on what was actually was said by the politicians and I couldn't understand why people were so surprised that Trump would win I felt like I was living on another planet. It seemed to me that he was the only person besides Sanders and a few others who addressed the issues that people cared about and being a socially liberal and fiscally conservative who actually liked Obama and Clinton a lot, it really surprised me how little I agreed with the Hillary campaign and the issues she ran on. I realized that if I felt so different from I would normally have considered my political position maybe a lot of other things I took for granted claimed by the normal media I followed, maybe I wasn't being feed the whole story. So I stopped relying on the news both online, tv and newspapers on anything other than the most basic description of the events and instead started digging into the "other side" i.e. the alt-right and conservative issues in general. I had heard about Milo, Ben Shapiro, Breitbart and other people was was described as right-wing and never had really looked into what they were saying. So I started digging in started to listen to what they actually had to say and to by big surprise I realized that I was actually agreeing with a lot of the things they said and that they certaintly weren't the evil racist right wing people they were being portrayed as. In fact they were actually often hated by the real right-wing. One of the most informative things was to listen to Dave Rubins Show which invites a lot of different people in and actually hear them out and make their cases. I have never been much of a political ideologist and always found that I agreed/disagreed with a lot of different people with a lot of different political backgrounds and never really could find my political shelf now I realize that it's because I never really questioned just how big the bias of most newspapers, tv-news and online media really is. My advice is drop the online news, the paper news and the TV news, start actually learning about the issues that you care about from the people who have thought about it most which I can assure you isn't the modern journalists.
masonic 9y ago
Here's a great example of subtle media bias in mainstream print media from today. The Washington Post just emailed an alert about the FL legislature's passage of SB 7026, the gun bill in response to the Douglas HS shooting: "Defying NRA, Florida legislature passes new rules to impose waiting period, raise purchasing age for long guns The Florida House bill imposes a three-day waiting period for most purchases of long guns and raises the minimum age for purchasing those weapons to 21... The response to the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead signaled a major shift for a state known as a legal laboratory for gun rights activists. It could become a blueprint for other states looking at new measures to address mass shootings." Now, that spin would have you believe that this was a major Democrat victory and an NRA defeat. In reality, the bill was watered down to near-meaninglessness and actually passed with Republican support and over Democrat opposition. All but 3 Democrat senators opposed it. 31 of 41 Democrat House members opposed it. None of that critical detail enters the WP narrative at all.
stevefeinstein 9y ago
That's nothing, I did it for 29 years.
jpfed 9y ago
From CJR: The Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the internet. Except he didn’t https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php
ageek123 9y ago
Turns out he didn't unplug at all: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php

133 points by coloneltcb 9y ago

I would encourage US residents who want a more balanced view of world events to read a mixture of the largest international, english language, online news portals/papers which are not published in the US: UK: Guardian UK: The Independent CA: The Globe and Mail (generally centrist), The National Post (generally right of center). PK: Dawn, The Daily Times IN: Times of India SG: Straights Times AU: Sydney Morning Herald

Tomte 9y ago
For DE: Spiegel Online (not the real Spiegel, but they obviously share many articles with the mothership): http://www.spiegel.de/international/ http://www.spiegel.de/international/ Zeit: http://www.zeit.de/english/index http://www.zeit.de/english/index
- walrus01 9y ago
  Not print media, but I find that the English language documentaries and news from DW are generally well balanced. They're certainly a lot closer to the CBC than they are to fox, msnbc, NBC, etc.

nindalf 9y ago

Eliminating notification spam sounds great and reading daily newspapers sounds great, but I've tried another variant of this with some success. Reading just the weekly version of the Economist left me vast amounts of free time and I didn't feel any less informed than when I was reading several sources over the course of a day. Of course, that's my own estimation of how well informed I was, so that might be far from accurate.

mFixman 9y ago
I go open step below that: most of my news comes from The Economist and similar weekly newspapers, but I also keep notification spam for important news from the BBC, which is mostly unbiased. I'm glad I know about yesterday's resignation of one of Trump's economic aides, but I don't spend valuable minutes trying to find everyone's opinions about its consequences.
davidw 9y ago
I used to get by on The Economist and a smattering of online news. It works pretty well, but not so much for a world that feels like it's moving really quickly. For instance: https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/971209163115253760 https://twitter.com/ananavarro/status/971209163115253760 This week: Nunberg subpoenaed, couldn’t stop blabbing; Kellyanne said to have violated ethics law; Carson realized HUD’s complicated; Cohn quit, over tariffs not anti-Semitism; Guy from UAE who knows stuff, cooperating w/Mueller; Trump tweeted there’s no chaos; It’s only Tuesday. ... and she wrote that before the news broke about the porn star suing Trump about their hush agreement/money inked in the weeks before the election. I subscribed to the Washington Post via Amazon for national coverage, and I also get my local paper for their coverage of things like city council meetings, which actually make a lot more differences in our day to day lives than a lot of national issues.
- rubidium 9y ago
  Why do you desire to be connected to that world?
  - davidw 9y ago
    Because I live in the US, and this stuff matters, one way or the other.
    - ghotli 9y ago
      I don't mean to pick on you specifically, because I'm sure you have your reasons for saying "this stuff matters". However, I am curious of what the value is of staying that up to date in the news cycle other than dopamine hits. Seems more like an addiction to stay that on top of the news cycle than a more measured approach like the weekly economist digests posited above.
      - davidw 9y ago
        The Economist just doesn't cover everything that's going on. Realistically, any one of us could ignore most news and be fine, but I feel that it's part of our job as citizens to be informed and aware. I also feel that it's worth kicking in some money to the people doing the journalism that's uncovering important stuff. Look at the Roy Moore stuff that got uncovered, for instance. That was the election right there.
detritus 9y ago
I'm a big fan of The Economist and have bought and/or subscribed to it pretty much continuously for almost twenty years now (young old man that i am), but unless you're entirely beholden to its agenda, which I find very un-self-questioning - I'd suggest you offset its perspective with a 'complementary adversarial' weekly. Last time I swore off excess media consumption (about a decade ago) I kept on with The Economist and found I was 'drinking the Kool Aid' after a while.
- bryananderson 9y ago
  What would you recommend as a good complement to The Economist?
  - detritus 9y ago
    To be honest, I'm not sure of a competing one-stop shop - I certainly didn't know when I last fasted from media. These days I do a daily scan of all the none-too-tabloidy newspapers (UK-based here), and on a weekly-or-so basis take in the likes of The Spectator, National Review and Foreign Affairs. - edit: I'm not going to lie - I could probably do with another breather - I'm unsure how much value I get from scouring all this crap.
  - smacktoward 9y ago
    If you're looking for an explicitly adversarial complement, Jacobin might fit the bill: https://jacobinmag.com/ https://jacobinmag.com/ (Though it's quarterly rather than weekly, of course)
  - thinkingemote 9y ago
    Newstatesman in the UK for a left wing weekly, politics centred periodical with minimal arts section and the book reviews are essentially ideological articles. the Spectator is more popular and a Tory/ right wing weekly with almost half of it devoted to culture, books, arts etc. I found the arts component of the Spectator to be relatively free of ideology. Recently I bought both and compared them. I found the writing quality in the newstatesman to be more variable, with a few Excellent and a few utterly awful articles. The Spectator is overall of good quality but nothing really stood out.

SpeciesInvader 9y ago

After reading the Black swan (Taken), I stopped reading every news outlet and did my best to not know up to the minute news. Like the author, I've felt more informed and able to make better decisions and hold better conversations because I'm not bombarded by constantly changing "facts". In fact, I feel liberated and but inundated with microscopic thoughts, but instead more general ideas. YMMV.

busterarm 9y ago
Very similar story here. I straight up miss some things, but nothing truly important. I've been spending more time deepening my career skills and the payoff versus being "on top of" current events has been enormous. tl;dr: Focus on what matters.
ribosometronome 9y ago
>I've felt more informed Sounds like you also run the risk of making Dunning–Kruger as a lifestyle choice.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

deadmetheny 9y ago

>print media old guard releases article stating that print media is good and totally better than digital Just more of the inevitable pushback from a dying industry's attempts to keep itself relevant. (also, why the downvotes, this is obvious propaganda)

cokernel 9y ago
I didn't downvote — and talking about downvotes just invites more — but the faux-quote summary you provide in your comment is inaccurate. A more accurate summary, provided in the article, is "Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social." The author explicitly rejects the claim you are imputing to him: "You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news." The whole article, as I understood it, was about the deeper understanding you can gain about a situation if you take things slow, in batches, instead of seeking to read and post shallow reactions quickly.
- to3m 9y ago
  In my view the faux-quote is entirely accurate as a characterisation, if not as a summary.
- deadmetheny 9y ago
  >The author explicitly rejects the claim you are imputing to him: "You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news." This isn't really pushed until the very end of the article, and it's not nearly as long as the rest. It feels very much like an inclusion mostly to appear unbiased. >A more accurate summary, provided in the article, is "Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social." I agree with this sentiment overall. Though, that is a quote the author of the column is echoing from someone else. Doesn't change that it's good advice, of course.
fenwick67 9y ago
People are probably downvoting you in part for your use of 'meme arrows'
- 9y ago

rock8y 9y ago

I started getting WSJ April last year and read it everyday now. Saves me a lot of time and got me back into reading books, set a target of 24 for the year.

toasterlovin 9y ago

Wikipedia has a current events portal. I think it's a pretty decent way to stay abreast of events without falling prey to the outrage cycle. Basically, nothing shows up on there unless it is significant enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry. That may not be the perfect filtering criteria, but it's world better than the algorithm that decides what ends up on the front page of Google News. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

tboyd47 9y ago
I use /r/neutralnews for this purpose. I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. It seems like an unfilled niche.
- dagw 9y ago
  I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. Sounds like you're looking for Reuters.
  - kerkeslager 9y ago
    There are a ton of professional news outlets with expressed commitment to political neutrality. Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral.
    - toasterlovin 9y ago
      Disagree. I think people want to be able to believe that their news sources are neutral. But I don't think they actually want their news sources to be neutral. That's the genius of what news has become: entertainment that justifies itself by allowing you to feel like you are doing your duty as a citizen by keeping up with current events.

legitster 9y ago

I'm in my 20s and used to read the local paper religiously. It is nice and relaxing, but reasons I quit: - Portability: I did most of my reading on public transit. Hauling around a huge packet to read definitely made me feel like an old person. - Quanitity: It was really tough disposing of the quantity of paper. If you skipped a day for whatever reason, the papers could really start piling up. I tried to end weekend service (the massive advertising packets that contained no news), and sales basically laughed me away. - Lack of news: So much of the paper was throwaway lifestyle stuff. - Pricing: It starts out cheap, but afterward they kind of lock you in.

snuxoll 9y ago
I ended up meeting in the middle. I have a Sunday-only subscription with the New York Times. I get a physical paper on Sunday and the rest of the week I have access to the replica edition included (which is the print edition, just available through the PressReader app) - I have a 12.9" iPad Pro I read said replica edition on which gets me as close to the experience of reading a broadsheet as possible considering I'm still reading on a screen. Yeah, my promo discount just ended so instead of ~$20/mo it's costing me $40/mo - but I value having a condensed, well curated collection of relevant news articles so the cost is easily justified for me.
- cgb223 9y ago
  How is their app for reading on? I've heard a lot of people complain about these proprietary digital reading apps for various magazines, papers etc
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    PressReader on mobile is pretty decent, there are tons of free sample papers and magazines available you can give a try to get a feel for it to see if it's your thing or not. There's some annoying hiccups with the NYTimes replica edition that bug me, if you pull up the text-view of an article that's on the front page and continued elsewhere you'll often get just the continuation instead of the full article (I don't know who to blame here, it's not deal-breaking but it is annoying) - but in general scrolling and paging around feels good, the app always downloads content to your device so offline viewing is there 100% of the time and the interface is workable. One other little nuisance is you can't link your NYTimes replica edition account to your existing PressReader account, so you have to manage them separately and sign into both (which the app allows, fortunately). Overall, would recommend, but give it a try before you commit to spending any money.

johnzim 9y ago

I do this to! I adore the Times http://thetimes.co.uk http://thetimes.co.uk although it requires a subscription. Their editor despises group think so you will always find dissenting and differing viewpoints as well as excellent reporting to the standard you'd expect of one of the oldest still published Newspapers in the world. Crucial to this was my decision to quit Twitter. I became significantly less anxious after leaving. It's impossible to avoid the constant bombardment of 'news' on that service.

character0 9y ago

The NYT has a newspaper option: https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper https://www.nytimes.com/section/todayspaper Not perfect, but it can definitely help eliminate some of the noise.

throwawaymanbot 9y ago

I Miss papers... No hysterical inflammatory comment section... just news.

graeme 9y ago

I have a print subscription to the weekend edition of the financial times, and I love it. It's quite fast to browse compared to online articles. You can skim a page and quickly see which articles are interesting. And uyou may read things you wouldn't have read online, as it's easy to glance past a headline and read a paragraph of an unfamiliar story.

Tomte 9y ago
When I had a weekly newspaper subscription, I didn't just skim, but stress out about what I 'had' to read or 'should' read. Real paper feels graver and more important to me than the web. Same with both Harper's and Lapham's Quarterly, which I really should read some day. Them now being two years old.
DrScump 9y ago
Print is great for browsing/scanning and reading. Online is better for clipping/saving/forwarding/referencing. For example, I have digital-only subscriptions to a couple of papers, but I prefer to do an initial scan of the print editions.

SomeHacker44 9y ago

Great, great article, thank you for sharing. For well over a decade I read the Economist cover to cover, every week, during my commute. At some point I started working from home and dropped the habit, and took up reading the NYT on-app when my commute resumed. The NYT apps all suck, IMO, because they do not reflect the print paper. The WSJ, however, has the print paper in digital form and I like it much better, but do not care for their spin and analysis. I found the Economist's take on the news to be somewhere between these two local New York papers and preferred it, but the digital version for whatever reason left me nonplussed. I wonder if there is a US news weekly akin to the Economist, with a good mix of news and analysis, with a well defined bias/opinion so that you're not left guessing what their perspective/slant is.

ghaff 9y ago
>I wonder if there is a US news weekly akin to the Economist, with a good mix of news and analysis, Not really. There used to be the weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report). Time is still hanging in there. But it's a pale shadow of its former self and was never either as deep or as broad as the Economist is.

imagetic 9y ago

I bought myself the NYT Sunday edition in print for 2017. If they could fix their subscription model I would have kept it, but after a year it doubled in price and customer support gave me flashbacks of trying to deal with AOL. I started reading the news in print because it was less stressful and I needed to train myself not to open the news each time I fired up a browser. The online papers put the opinion and doomsday headlines all over the place and I just needed to read a refined source of news that had time to be digested before it was published. The Washington Post has been a surprisingly good source of news over the last year as well. I prefer it over the NYT at this point and wish I could get it in print where I live. Aside from the many far leaning online sources, my general rule of thumb is just to avoid anything that is linked to TV. When CNN figures out how to rewind to 1990, I might change my mind. But print allowed me to take a moment and digest the news. Online was almost always in a state of panic, especially over the last year.

twothamendment 9y ago
I loved AOL support! Every time I tried to cancel they would give me 1, 2 or 3 months more for free. As for pricing, my local paper charges more for a digital subscription that to deliver a paper to my house. Subscription models are messed up.
- reaperducer 9y ago
  >As for pricing, my local paper charges more for a digital subscription that to deliver a paper to my house. Subscription models are messed up. It's because print advertising is still more effective than digital. We've been hearing for more than a decade that this will change any day now, but it hasn't happened yet. And the more people use ad blockers, the longer it will remain true.
flomo 9y ago
I signed up for a NY Times Sunday subscription because at the time it was roughly the same price as the full-access digital subscription, but the price has gone up over time. However, I find the print edition is a much better experience than the digital platforms. Mostly because I can simply ignore the mostly awful editorial section or things that are buried in eg Style, whereas on the site and app those pieces are mixed-in with the news, giving the appearance of bias. Also, there are often pieces which appear on page A6 of the newspaper which are buried on the website, so you get a very different view of the news with the actual paper.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jccalhoun 9y ago

When I was in grad school the college gave people newspapers to read. So for a few years I read USA Today and the NY Times regularly. There is no way I would ever pay for a newspaper subscription. Most times there was nothing in them I cared about or hadn't heard about. Why should I pay for a sports section when I don't care about sports? Why should I pay for an arts section in the NY Times that is all about plays and events that are only playing in New York which is several hundred miles away?

dredmorbius 9y ago
Bundling is a form of risk management in which a publisher bets that the collective value of a bundle will be of greater interest to a large population than any disaggregated set. There are problems when certain portions of that bundle dominate the product, and are not what you care for (sport being a disinterest you and I share). Worse if sport intrudes other sections of the production -- I'm familiar with a print source in which it may be found on the front page, multiple times within the front section, periodically on the Op Ed pages (though those are otherwise almost wholly lacking in interest or information already), business, real estate, entertainment, .... I'd be happy if it were simply restricted to one section which I could then discard with no regrets. Your criticism of the Times's culture coverage is one I share. I've strongly suggested that at the least a regional substitute be offered such that local offerings elsewhere within the US -- say, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle -- be offered print subscribers in those areas. The Times is close to being a reasonable alternative to any local publication, though this also poses concerns....

Clubber 9y ago

The news in general is so awful these days. It's gotten to the point where I rarely read the comments section because I already know exactly what the majority of the audience's opinion is. I know what Rush Limbaugh's audience thinks before I read it, and I know what WaPo's audience thinks before I read it. That's evidence of a pretty serious herd mentality.

neverartful 9y ago

Good article. The author suggests that news in print is accurate. I believe that more times than not, it is more accurate than online news. However, it does not eliminate bias. I get my news online by scanning CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC. I view ALL news as being biased (online or print) and by looking at several sources I figure that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Some other benefits of printed news (even if still biased): the ads in print stay where they are. They don't hover over the article I'm trying to read and force the reader to click 'X'. They don't start playing video clips. They don't have ads switching in and out and moving around. Print also has no way of tracking what I read.

asldkfjalsdkfj 9y ago
I have the same view of "the truth is in the middle." I supplement my news with itar-tass, xinhua, and irna to calibrate my view globally. It's also an exercise of learning what ways other people view the world. How can you understand someone that only gets information from one channel if you don't know what that channel is saying?
- polskibus 9y ago
  Dialectics is a proven ancient method for gathering information. I agree it is very useful when you've got the time. However, the sheer volume of today's information means that nobody has time for that in most cases.
superhuzza 9y ago
Personally, I outright disregard a large number of sources - There's so much rubbish online that the 'middle ground' is extremely unlikely to be the truth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
emodendroket 9y ago
> I get my news online by scanning CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC. I view ALL news as being biased (online or print) and by looking at several sources I figure that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Frankly, these are all sources which don't disagree with each other very much, fundamentally.

jontayesp 9y ago

I want to add another suggestion - try a podcast like “The Daily” from NYT. It’s about 20 minutes long per episode, and covers one or two of the most important issues of the day. It’s a more human/meaningful experience for me, because you hear the voices of people who are directly affected by the news (such as the students from parkland). It adds an emotional depth, and I feel like I can stay up to date with current events without mindlessly scanning dozens of articles. The host, Michael Barbaro, is fantastic and pleasant to listen to. Give it a try!

nas 9y ago
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I listen to and enjoy "The Daily" as well. However, I dislike the "human interest" stories. I would prefer it to be an unemotional summary of the previous days news. I'm not a robot and I don't hate humans. ;-) However, I feel like those kind of stories can trick you into making illogical decisions. I.e. "think of the children" argument for some new policy. It is a trend in news that I dislike. I think they are trying to make the news more engaging but I think it is leading to poorer decision making.

dismal2 9y ago

The medium is the message

postit 9y ago

I bought a subscription of Die Zeit by mistake one year ago. It arrives by post every Thursday and I'm always surprised by the quality of the articles (even if my German isn't that good). Compared to the online counterparts, they are deep and even present several points and vision of the same subject. The best example was a article where they divided the page in two columns, and two different authors explained their points about the immigration crisis.

confounded 9y ago

> After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad. This was also my experience of similar experiments and introspections.

fluxem 9y ago

For two months, I didn't read any news and nothing happend. Reading news that doesn't affect you or you do something about it is a waste of time.

vinceguidry 9y ago

Print requires taking time out of your day. Online consumption can be mixed in with whatever else you're doing that day. I think that's the real reason only old people read the paper these days. Content doesn't matter as much as packaging sometimes.

Bromskloss 9y ago

Do you need to actively follow the news at all?

lostphilosopher 9y ago

I've done similar experiments with tweaking my media diet. I haven't found something that seems right, but I have determined a couple things that I want. My ideal news source would: 1. Not be speculative. I want to know what happened and what it meant/means, not what it might mean, or what might happen next. 2. Not involve PR people. I already know exactly what they're going to say, and why they're going to say it, they've brought me no value. Bring me either the newsmaker themselves, or someone who has at least the _possibility_ of being neutral-ish. 3. Never auto-play anything or force me to dismiss an add. Yay print on that front. :-)

p33p 9y ago
I honestly enjoy Axios as a starter for news. They are relatively unbiased, gives me what I need to know, and tells me why it's important. If something has peaked my interest more, I'll turn towards WaPo, NYT, etc for further in depth analysis. Have you looked at Axios before?
- lostphilosopher 9y ago
  I haven't, but I'll give it a go. :-)

dredmorbius 9y ago

I'm of mixed minds on this. The online world can be (and quite often is) an extraordinarily bad information source, and compounds numerous limited-attention dynamics. At the same time, both print and broadcast media sources seem to be markedly worse, even the "best" of these. I find numerous national broadcasters (BBC, CBC, Australian ABC, PBS, NPR) almost completely unlistenable, despite decades of previous exposure. I'm not sure if they're getting markedly worse, or my own discernment has changed, though I suspect bits of both. Some print sources are reasonably good, and The Economist, the Financial Times, and The New York Times are better than most. Many other print sources are execrably bad: Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the print dailies of most major U.S. cities, or papers such as USA Today. They are irrelevant, uninformative, distracting, and information-poor. They're not notably prone to yellow-journalism incitement, which is almost worse: they're both bad AND uninteresting. Print is no guarantee of quality, only of delay. My preferred sources: Long-form media programmes. On the Media (WNYC), Fresh Air (WHHY), The World (WBUR), and Paul Kennedy's Ideas (CBC) are my regular beat. With the exception of The World (a news magazine), each typically offers longer-form presentation, with 1-4 segments per hour, or roughly 10-15 minutes of treatment on a topic, minimum. Many are weekly, which required discarding a great deal of information that doesn't fit the hour. Each is pre-recorded, which is to say, well edited. That last point is a particular disappointment with the BBC and NPR news magazines particularly: as they've shifted from a generally pre-recorded (sometimes by several days, though often by only a few hours or even minutes) format to live, the glitches of live broadcast have imposed themselves rudely and distractingly. I particularly noted this during the Boston Marathon bombing coverage in which the BBC attempted to have live, on-the-street coverage of the manhunt, which ended up mostly being an on-the-air troubleshooting of low-quality audio conveying low-density information (largely zero or none). The product of the 1990s may have sacrificed a slight bit of timeliness, but was vastly more relevant, prepared, and polished. OTM's look at the alt-right and racism, this past week, was a particularly excellent instance and an exemplar of the class. Books. There are materials which are simply best obtained from domain experts who've had months, or years, or decades to digest and present a concept. Oddly enough, there's a counterpoint to haw fast-moving present events are in that the timeless and ageless themes seem more important. Wikipedia. For long-developing and complex stories, it is vastly superior in information delivery to a daily broadcast or print format, or even a weekly digest. Selected online sources. Hewing to high-quality, and away from anything in the least sensationalistic. I add crap sources to my router's blocklist with impunity. Disconnecting. Mostly I actively go out of my way to avoid ongoing distraction. I'm managing to remain reasonably informed, though that may of course be my own confirmation biases showing.

ThomPete 9y ago

After the latest election, I got seriously disillusioned by how the media had covered political issues. I constantly had a very different reading on what was actually was said by the politicians and I couldn't understand why people were so surprised that Trump would win I felt like I was living on another planet. It seemed to me that he was the only person besides Sanders and a few others who addressed the issues that people cared about and being a socially liberal and fiscally conservative who actually liked Obama and Clinton a lot, it really surprised me how little I agreed with the Hillary campaign and the issues she ran on. I realized that if I felt so different from I would normally have considered my political position maybe a lot of other things I took for granted claimed by the normal media I followed, maybe I wasn't being feed the whole story. So I stopped relying on the news both online, tv and newspapers on anything other than the most basic description of the events and instead started digging into the "other side" i.e. the alt-right and conservative issues in general. I had heard about Milo, Ben Shapiro, Breitbart and other people was was described as right-wing and never had really looked into what they were saying. So I started digging in started to listen to what they actually had to say and to by big surprise I realized that I was actually agreeing with a lot of the things they said and that they certaintly weren't the evil racist right wing people they were being portrayed as. In fact they were actually often hated by the real right-wing. One of the most informative things was to listen to Dave Rubins Show which invites a lot of different people in and actually hear them out and make their cases. I have never been much of a political ideologist and always found that I agreed/disagreed with a lot of different people with a lot of different political backgrounds and never really could find my political shelf now I realize that it's because I never really questioned just how big the bias of most newspapers, tv-news and online media really is. My advice is drop the online news, the paper news and the TV news, start actually learning about the issues that you care about from the people who have thought about it most which I can assure you isn't the modern journalists.

masonic 9y ago

Here's a great example of subtle media bias in mainstream print media from today. The Washington Post just emailed an alert about the FL legislature's passage of SB 7026, the gun bill in response to the Douglas HS shooting: "Defying NRA, Florida legislature passes new rules to impose waiting period, raise purchasing age for long guns The Florida House bill imposes a three-day waiting period for most purchases of long guns and raises the minimum age for purchasing those weapons to 21... The response to the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead signaled a major shift for a state known as a legal laboratory for gun rights activists. It could become a blueprint for other states looking at new measures to address mass shootings." Now, that spin would have you believe that this was a major Democrat victory and an NRA defeat. In reality, the bill was watered down to near-meaninglessness and actually passed with Republican support and over Democrat opposition. All but 3 Democrat senators opposed it. 31 of 41 Democrat House members opposed it. None of that critical detail enters the WP narrative at all.

stevefeinstein 9y ago

That's nothing, I did it for 29 years.

jpfed 9y ago

From CJR: The Times tech columnist ‘unplugged’ from the internet. Except he didn’t https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php

ageek123 9y ago

Turns out he didn't unplug at all: https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php https://www.cjr.org/analysis/farhad-manjoo-nyt-unplug.php