7 ms·

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

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.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - kerkeslager 9y ago
        I think we agree that news sources aren't neutral simply because they express a commitment to neutrality. I think that we also agree that people believe news sources are neutral when those news sources aren't neutral. However, I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "wanting your news sources to be neutral" and "wanting to be able to believe that your news sources are neutral". It's both pedantic and not borne out by any evidence. You're assuming motivations which simply aren't apparent.
        toasterlovin 9y ago
        What I'm getting at is this: people don't want to base their positions on objective facts. They want to base their positions on how they feel. In order to facilitate this, it is useful to have a news source that claims to be objective, but is actually slanted toward confirming the righteousness of the positions you hold. Thus, people want to believe that their favorite news source is objective (so they can justify their position with righteous conviction), but they don't actually want it to be objective (so they can avoid the terrifying work of modifying their worldview). Something apropos: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090
        kerkeslager 9y ago
        I get what you're saying, and I'm saying that what you're saying is both pedantic and not borne out by evidence. The paper you linked concludes that reasoning (when done correctly) works as intended regardless of the motives for reasoning. Given that reasoning (when done correctly) works regardless of the motives for reasoning, when people incorrectly reason that a news source is neutral, it indicates that reasoning was not done correctly, and that their motivations for reasoning aren't a constructive explanation for why they didn't reason correctly (i.e. your point is pedantic). Further, the article you linked doesn't go so far as to disagree with my point--it doesn't make the mistake you're making, which is to assume that people can't want more than one thing. People can want to base their news source to be neutral AND people can want to feel good (i.e. not feel cognitive dissonance). Even if you were to somehow prove your not-evident point, it doesn't give you a basis to disagree with what I said, unless you can prove that people want to feel good to the exclusion of all other things they want from their news source. The article doesn't say that (i.e. your point is not borne out by evidence, even the evidence that you presented).
- kzrdude 9y ago
  The BBC kind of does that commitment, doesn't it? As do many other public service channels, like NPR. See also http://ethics.npr.org/ http://ethics.npr.org/ Of course it can be discussed what the political leanings of the outcomes actually are.
  - Kalium 9y ago
    I listen to KQED on a regular basis. It's a lot of things, but politically neutral can't be reasonably claimed to be among them. Not unless you think sitting square between 70s-type radicals and mainstream centerism is a form of neutrality. I generally agree with their politics, but I find the constant slant somewhat annoying. To put it another way: it's very possible to interpret fairness and impartiality in creative ways. And some NPR member stations make a habit of this.
    - CompelTechnic 9y ago
      The biggest issue I have with NPR is selection bias. They spend a large fraction of the day airing stories of poverty and despair, closely related to hot-button political issues (USA healthcare, etc) that end in a tone of "we stated the facts of the matter, and the facts are that people are suffering." It is obvious that they are imploring the listener toward more liberal viewpoints.
      - lostphilosopher 9y ago
        Faithful NPR (specifically my local branch) listener here. I agree with your general point, though I notice it most with immigration related stories. The thing I appreciate about how NPR covers things though is that their commentators are almost never spokespeople/PR reps. They are legit professionals in the field, elected officials, or people who seriously study this subject matter. Of course they still have bias, but not _nearly_ as much as what I hear / see in other media which is "person whose literal/only job is to promote political stance X."
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    The BBC is pretty biased for UK news and for rest of world their bureaus are thin on the ground. Pre David Kelly they used to take their commitment more seriously.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. Pretty much all of them have some form of an “expressed commitment to political neutrality”, even Fox News did until fairly recently.. Of course, whether there is any substantive backing to the expressed commitment is a whole different question.
  - abricot 9y ago
    Fairly recently? 1996?
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      They dropped “fair and balanced” last year, IIRC.
      - mmanfrin 9y ago
        Are you suggesting Fox was committed to neutrality up until last year?
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        Do you mean an actual commitment or an expressed commitment? They had the latter, but very much not the former, to the extent that the latter had been a source of jokes for many years.
- msla 9y ago
  Political neutrality is defined by the frame, and it includes the fact that facts, themselves, are political, in that some political views are incompatible with certain facts. Therefore, including certain facts in your worldview pushes some political sources out of the frame as being factually incorrect, which is a form of bias. For example, political views from someone who insists that global warming isn't happening are out-of-frame as being factually incorrect. That means a number of right-wing sites are gone, as the insistence that there is no global warming is more of a right-wing conceit than left-wing. The alternative is not ignoring anyone, regardless of how lunatic they are, which means you admit known nutcases like whale.to and Natural News into your news diet, and that will give you a very warped view of the world.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Also which unchallenged facts are emphasized. People who have a restricted media diet are pretty easy to surprise just by relaying objective information nobody really disputes that their news sources didn't deem newsworthy. Natural news et al may not be worth paying attention to but foreign propaganda outfits (e.g. Russia today) can sometimes be quite informative if read skeptically, even if only to add context.
  - wintermutesGhst 9y ago
    This is an interesting idea for understanding how different worldviews form. Possibly also how sentiments like "facts have a liberal bias" or "liberals live in a fantasy" come about and ring true. The set of facts you use to judge who/what is 'in-frame' are essential to your understanding of the world. Someone else who treats those facts as optional ("Sure they don't believe in global warming, but they understand the issues with immigration") clearly has a poor understanding of "how the world works".
- zaroth 9y ago
  Reading your comment I immediately scoffed and thought, well what a cute marketing trick, I’m sure I’ll click over and just read more of the same.... Imagine my shock to see the top post pointing to RealClearInvestigations analyzing the role of “PROMISE” discipline policies on Cruz’s ability to pull off his attack even after over 40 run-ins with the police. Then again, the next half dozen link to articles about; a man allegedly attacking immigrants after yelling “Get out of my country”, Gary Cohen resignation, successful teacher strike gaining a 5% raise, Stormy Daniels sues Trump, and Kellyanne Conway violating ethics rules.
  - tboyd47 9y ago
    Eh, maybe the issue is we're all so bad at recognizing bias that we can't even imagine what "neutral" would be like.
r00fus 9y ago
There's also WikiTribune [1] for more long-form reporting. I donate so people can get informed, reasoned journalism that's not PR hit/puff pieces or distracting bullshit. Plus they solicit ideas from readers in addition to content from journalists. [1] https://www.wikitribune.com https://www.wikitribune.com
- LukeShu 9y ago
  There's also Wikinews, which is run by the Wikimedia foundation (Wikipedia). https://en.wikinews.org/ https://en.wikinews.org/
maxxxxx 9y ago
This portal is good! Thanks.
tomcooks 9y ago
I suggest using spidr.today[0], it's a wonderful aggregator. What makes it different from the competition is that it makes it trivially easy to compare how different news sources narrate the same piece of news [0](https://spidr.today/ https://spidr.today/)
- nathan_long 9y ago
  AllSides exists to enable easy comparison between news sources with different biases: https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    It's more "all sides within the constraints of the American overton window" than it is all sides.
    - dublinben 9y ago
      It's pretty telling how narrow their definition of "all sides" is when Huffington Post and The New Yorker make up the furthest left of their spectrum. This in a world where the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) and It's Going Down News (@IGD_News) are but a click away.
      - crdoconnor 9y ago
        I was more thinking of the lack of international diversity on international stories.
      - nathan_long 9y ago
        Are you saying they lean right, or just need more extreme examples? I don't see Breitbart on there, either, FWIW. Maybe they're applying a "not too far left or right" filter or a "popularity" filter in order to keep from having so many takes on a given story that it's overwhelming?
- 9y ago
dredmorbius 9y ago
Wikipedia itself is an excellent source of information particularly on long-developing stories. This is a point I first realised in 2004 immediately following the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Indonesia and the Indian Ocean. As traditional media outlets struggled (some more successfully than others) to both present the current status and new developments, Wikipedia offered a digest of the best current state of knowledge, and, via its changelogs, what had been recently changed (generally: added, occasionally removed). This is a pattern that's followed through, say, the 2010 Tohoku quake + tsunami + nuclear core meltdown, several long-running financial and business stories, Russian campaign interference, the Oroville Dam crisis, etc. Pretty much any story that runs more than 1-3 days and has complex elements. I'm very well aware that Wikipedia is not perfect, is subject to influence, and is not itself a primary source. There is the odd outlet or journalist which exceeds Wikipedia (Brad Plumer, formerly of Vox and now of The New York Times, for example, has the best article I've seen, hands, down, on Oroville, though that was and remains a one-point-in-time effort, Wikipedia continues to update its article. Plumer, is, by the way, and absolutely excellent journalist, and as before, I am not his mother....). Wikimedia's expansion into journalism is a fascinating development.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  I'm hopeful about their expansion into journalism. When I can contain my addictive relationship with news, the current events portal is close to perfect for me. I hadn't crystalized the thought, but what you said about it being a great source for long developing stories is absolutely true and one of the things I appreciate most about it.

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.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - kerkeslager 9y ago
      I think we agree that news sources aren't neutral simply because they express a commitment to neutrality. I think that we also agree that people believe news sources are neutral when those news sources aren't neutral. However, I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "wanting your news sources to be neutral" and "wanting to be able to believe that your news sources are neutral". It's both pedantic and not borne out by any evidence. You're assuming motivations which simply aren't apparent.
      - toasterlovin 9y ago
        What I'm getting at is this: people don't want to base their positions on objective facts. They want to base their positions on how they feel. In order to facilitate this, it is useful to have a news source that claims to be objective, but is actually slanted toward confirming the righteousness of the positions you hold. Thus, people want to believe that their favorite news source is objective (so they can justify their position with righteous conviction), but they don't actually want it to be objective (so they can avoid the terrifying work of modifying their worldview). Something apropos: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1698090
        kerkeslager 9y ago
        I get what you're saying, and I'm saying that what you're saying is both pedantic and not borne out by evidence. The paper you linked concludes that reasoning (when done correctly) works as intended regardless of the motives for reasoning. Given that reasoning (when done correctly) works regardless of the motives for reasoning, when people incorrectly reason that a news source is neutral, it indicates that reasoning was not done correctly, and that their motivations for reasoning aren't a constructive explanation for why they didn't reason correctly (i.e. your point is pedantic). Further, the article you linked doesn't go so far as to disagree with my point--it doesn't make the mistake you're making, which is to assume that people can't want more than one thing. People can want to base their news source to be neutral AND people can want to feel good (i.e. not feel cognitive dissonance). Even if you were to somehow prove your not-evident point, it doesn't give you a basis to disagree with what I said, unless you can prove that people want to feel good to the exclusion of all other things they want from their news source. The article doesn't say that (i.e. your point is not borne out by evidence, even the evidence that you presented).
kzrdude 9y ago
The BBC kind of does that commitment, doesn't it? As do many other public service channels, like NPR. See also http://ethics.npr.org/ http://ethics.npr.org/ Of course it can be discussed what the political leanings of the outcomes actually are.
- Kalium 9y ago
  I listen to KQED on a regular basis. It's a lot of things, but politically neutral can't be reasonably claimed to be among them. Not unless you think sitting square between 70s-type radicals and mainstream centerism is a form of neutrality. I generally agree with their politics, but I find the constant slant somewhat annoying. To put it another way: it's very possible to interpret fairness and impartiality in creative ways. And some NPR member stations make a habit of this.
  - CompelTechnic 9y ago
    The biggest issue I have with NPR is selection bias. They spend a large fraction of the day airing stories of poverty and despair, closely related to hot-button political issues (USA healthcare, etc) that end in a tone of "we stated the facts of the matter, and the facts are that people are suffering." It is obvious that they are imploring the listener toward more liberal viewpoints.
    - lostphilosopher 9y ago
      Faithful NPR (specifically my local branch) listener here. I agree with your general point, though I notice it most with immigration related stories. The thing I appreciate about how NPR covers things though is that their commentators are almost never spokespeople/PR reps. They are legit professionals in the field, elected officials, or people who seriously study this subject matter. Of course they still have bias, but not _nearly_ as much as what I hear / see in other media which is "person whose literal/only job is to promote political stance X."
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  The BBC is pretty biased for UK news and for rest of world their bureaus are thin on the ground. Pre David Kelly they used to take their commitment more seriously.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. Pretty much all of them have some form of an “expressed commitment to political neutrality”, even Fox News did until fairly recently.. Of course, whether there is any substantive backing to the expressed commitment is a whole different question.
- abricot 9y ago
  Fairly recently? 1996?
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    They dropped “fair and balanced” last year, IIRC.
    - mmanfrin 9y ago
      Are you suggesting Fox was committed to neutrality up until last year?
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        Do you mean an actual commitment or an expressed commitment? They had the latter, but very much not the former, to the extent that the latter had been a source of jokes for many years.
msla 9y ago
Political neutrality is defined by the frame, and it includes the fact that facts, themselves, are political, in that some political views are incompatible with certain facts. Therefore, including certain facts in your worldview pushes some political sources out of the frame as being factually incorrect, which is a form of bias. For example, political views from someone who insists that global warming isn't happening are out-of-frame as being factually incorrect. That means a number of right-wing sites are gone, as the insistence that there is no global warming is more of a right-wing conceit than left-wing. The alternative is not ignoring anyone, regardless of how lunatic they are, which means you admit known nutcases like whale.to and Natural News into your news diet, and that will give you a very warped view of the world.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Also which unchallenged facts are emphasized. People who have a restricted media diet are pretty easy to surprise just by relaying objective information nobody really disputes that their news sources didn't deem newsworthy. Natural news et al may not be worth paying attention to but foreign propaganda outfits (e.g. Russia today) can sometimes be quite informative if read skeptically, even if only to add context.
- wintermutesGhst 9y ago
  This is an interesting idea for understanding how different worldviews form. Possibly also how sentiments like "facts have a liberal bias" or "liberals live in a fantasy" come about and ring true. The set of facts you use to judge who/what is 'in-frame' are essential to your understanding of the world. Someone else who treats those facts as optional ("Sure they don't believe in global warming, but they understand the issues with immigration") clearly has a poor understanding of "how the world works".
zaroth 9y ago
Reading your comment I immediately scoffed and thought, well what a cute marketing trick, I’m sure I’ll click over and just read more of the same.... Imagine my shock to see the top post pointing to RealClearInvestigations analyzing the role of “PROMISE” discipline policies on Cruz’s ability to pull off his attack even after over 40 run-ins with the police. Then again, the next half dozen link to articles about; a man allegedly attacking immigrants after yelling “Get out of my country”, Gary Cohen resignation, successful teacher strike gaining a 5% raise, Stormy Daniels sues Trump, and Kellyanne Conway violating ethics rules.
- tboyd47 9y ago
  Eh, maybe the issue is we're all so bad at recognizing bias that we can't even imagine what "neutral" would be like.

r00fus 9y ago

There's also WikiTribune [1] for more long-form reporting. I donate so people can get informed, reasoned journalism that's not PR hit/puff pieces or distracting bullshit. Plus they solicit ideas from readers in addition to content from journalists. [1] https://www.wikitribune.com https://www.wikitribune.com

LukeShu 9y ago
There's also Wikinews, which is run by the Wikimedia foundation (Wikipedia). https://en.wikinews.org/ https://en.wikinews.org/

maxxxxx 9y ago

This portal is good! Thanks.

tomcooks 9y ago

I suggest using spidr.today[0], it's a wonderful aggregator. What makes it different from the competition is that it makes it trivially easy to compare how different news sources narrate the same piece of news [0](https://spidr.today/ https://spidr.today/)

nathan_long 9y ago
AllSides exists to enable easy comparison between news sources with different biases: https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  It's more "all sides within the constraints of the American overton window" than it is all sides.
  - dublinben 9y ago
    It's pretty telling how narrow their definition of "all sides" is when Huffington Post and The New Yorker make up the furthest left of their spectrum. This in a world where the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) and It's Going Down News (@IGD_News) are but a click away.
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      I was more thinking of the lack of international diversity on international stories.
    - nathan_long 9y ago
      Are you saying they lean right, or just need more extreme examples? I don't see Breitbart on there, either, FWIW. Maybe they're applying a "not too far left or right" filter or a "popularity" filter in order to keep from having so many takes on a given story that it's overwhelming?
9y ago

dredmorbius 9y ago

Wikipedia itself is an excellent source of information particularly on long-developing stories. This is a point I first realised in 2004 immediately following the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Indonesia and the Indian Ocean. As traditional media outlets struggled (some more successfully than others) to both present the current status and new developments, Wikipedia offered a digest of the best current state of knowledge, and, via its changelogs, what had been recently changed (generally: added, occasionally removed). This is a pattern that's followed through, say, the 2010 Tohoku quake + tsunami + nuclear core meltdown, several long-running financial and business stories, Russian campaign interference, the Oroville Dam crisis, etc. Pretty much any story that runs more than 1-3 days and has complex elements. I'm very well aware that Wikipedia is not perfect, is subject to influence, and is not itself a primary source. There is the odd outlet or journalist which exceeds Wikipedia (Brad Plumer, formerly of Vox and now of The New York Times, for example, has the best article I've seen, hands, down, on Oroville, though that was and remains a one-point-in-time effort, Wikipedia continues to update its article. Plumer, is, by the way, and absolutely excellent journalist, and as before, I am not his mother....). Wikimedia's expansion into journalism is a fascinating development.

toasterlovin 9y ago
I'm hopeful about their expansion into journalism. When I can contain my addictive relationship with news, the current events portal is close to perfect for me. I hadn't crystalized the thought, but what you said about it being a great source for long developing stories is absolutely true and one of the things I appreciate most about it.