23 ms·

I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues

I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across. In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not mention the other side or present a very simplified or exaggerated view and provide an opposing viewpoint. They cover the same thing differently depending on which party is in power. The border crisis is a good example of this. All of these make it real hard to compare viewpoints with a proper reference frame and even treatment. Eventually I just gave up and read Politico, Bloomberg and FiveThrityEight now. They seem to be used by pros from both sides and mostly report on what's "happening" rather than provide opinion. I can then form my own opinions.

dev_by_day 5y ago
This site is great for trying to get different takes https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news I used to do what you did(just read a bunch of major publications from differing political orientations) but also found issue with not being able to compare different perspectives easily.
- brlewis 5y ago
  Allsides is prominently featured in the article.
  - medicineman 5y ago
    >implying they read the articles
  - dev_by_day 5y ago
    yes! I meant it more as a +1 to allsides but should have clarified that.
- andrepd 5y ago
  I'm a bit disappointed that outlets like NTY, or Associated Press for cryin out loud, are branded as "Left". Disappointing that actual Left-wing discourse is so outside currently acceptable Overton window.
lostapathy 5y ago
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, This is a big issue. But at the same time - it's not clear to me what the solution when every side is pushing hype rather than news. How do you publish an "opposing take" on something the other side is publishing that isn't real in the first place? It's not ideal to even acknowledge lies.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I do the same thing, and I've noticed that this "they don't present the other side" thing is getting worse with time. I recently read [this HuffPo article][0] about how only 1% of American film characters are identifiably Muslim; however, nowhere in the article does it even mention the share of Americans who are Muslim, nor the share of movie characters that are of other religions. These things are certainly obvious and important points of context, but the article doesn't even broach them. (According to [1], only 1% of Americans are Muslim, and 60+% are Christian--and I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian never mind [how they are portrayed][2]) Worse, this seems to be increasingly prevalent in the academy as well. Indeed, the study cited in the article (from University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative) also doesn't mention these points of context and the paper is pretty overtly propagandist. [0]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/movie-characters-muslim-riz-ahmed_n_60c2072ce4b0af343e9cc2eb https://www.huffpost.com/entry/movie-characters-muslim-riz-a... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States [2]: http://decentfilms.com/articles/hollywood-religion-problem http://decentfilms.com/articles/hollywood-religion-problem
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "(According to [1], only 1% of Americans are Muslim, and 60+% are Christian--and I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian never mind [how they are portrayed][2])" Yet both Muslims and Christians are in the news a lot, and there's a lot of political discussion about them. It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes, wouldn't you agree?
  - burnished 5y ago
    for me, personally, absolutely not. I want thoughtful portrayal of character in media that I consume, but am in no way desiring yet more religious representation.
    - XorNot 5y ago
pmoriarty 5y ago
"They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives" Check out Counterspin, from the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).[1] They monitor mainstream media and critique it from a left-wing perspective. [1] - https://fair.org/counterspin/ https://fair.org/counterspin/
- rainingmonkey 5y ago
  Seconding counterspin! I don't always agree with them ideologically, but I find it valuable to hear a perspective on US politics & media from outside the usual Right/Center-Right binary.
vmception 5y ago
www.allsides.com They compare similar headlines and also show you what you might have missed because one side doesn't even surface the headline Edit: this article is about allsides, if you read it
nickthegreek 5y ago
Ive recently started reading the Tangle newsletter. It’s a daily drop that focuses on 1 topic and provides the left, right and their take on an issue. https://www.readtangle.com/ https://www.readtangle.com/
- jkubicek 5y ago
  I've been a subscriber to Tangle for a while now and I love his takes on the news. He operates just a little to the right of my own political persuasions, but even when I disagree with him, it's a respectful disagreement. Isaac's positions are nuanced, well-reasonsed and kind. That newsletter is exactly what we all wish political debate in the US was like.
  - zucked 5y ago
    Thanks for this suggestion - Hadn't seen this before but previewed and really liked what I saw. Sub'd.
- alisonatwork 5y ago
  I unsubscribed from that newsletter a few months ago when I realized it was just perpetuating the problem by reporting on "both sides", even in cases where there wasn't much worth talking about on either "side". It's interesting if you would like to understand what propaganda the elites in each political party would like their base to digest, but it's not very interesting if you just want to see what actually happened on a particular day. Someone on Hacker News a while back recommended the Wikipedia current events portal[0] and I have to say this feels like a more efficient way to consume the news. It feels less tied to trending topics and manufactured drama, and is more centered on what actually happened in the world that was especially notable on a particular day. I feel like a lot of "news" that's reported in the American political media is just ideological argument, which after you've read the same argument for the nth time doesn't come across as very interesting any more. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
threatofrain 5y ago
Google News gives you precisely this portfolio of vendors. Why would anyone subscribe to a single news vendor? I'd also advise adding WION, Al Jazeera, Axios, and The Guardian + BBC.
- makomk 5y ago
  The Guardian and the BBC basically represent the same political faction as say the New York Times and CNN in the USA, except obviously with more focus on UK stories. You can even see the overlap when they report on stories from the other country.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    Inter-rater reliability is very useful. You don't simply seek novelty, right? Not having the vocabulary to discuss the agreement and disagreement of the BBC or the Guardian would be a mistake if you want to talk about news fluency, as they have made a name for themselves in the west.
    - unknown_error 5y ago
      The BBC and the Guardian do differ on takes, but both are very far cry from the right-leaning outlets. Both are part of the same left-leaning echo chamber in that nobody on the right trusts either source. Good luck getting a Breitbart/Newsmax reader to switch to even the NY Times or Reuters or AP, much less The Guardian.
- smt88 5y ago
  Google News is a dumpster fire. They include Sputnik and other govt propaganda sites from oppressive regimes.
  - unknown_error 5y ago
    It's gotten significantly worse over time. Are there better alternatives that collate news, by topic, from multiple sources? Newsvoice was an app that tried to crowdsource that job instead of using algorithms. It very quickly became an alt-right cesspool, presumably because those are the same people who feel disenfranchised by FAKE NEWS LIBERAL MEDIA and so flock to alternative communities.
nateberkopec 5y ago
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives I remember seeing Twitter chatter from the right re: the Fauci email dump, and so I went on various liberal outlets to try to get the left-wing perspective, and it was complete crickets. Especially when it's something I can't just read and form an opinion on myself (Fauci's email dump was absolutely massive), I depend on journalists to accurately summarize and contextualize primary sources. And it's really hard to get a straight take when one side won't even bother to write a "this is a nothingburger, here's why" article.
- arcticfox 5y ago
  From someone else's link, this Tangle site seems pretty solid. Specifically on Fauci's emails: https://www.readtangle.com/p/dr-anthony-fauci-emails-coronavirus https://www.readtangle.com/p/dr-anthony-fauci-emails-coronav...
  - my_usernam3 5y ago
    Thanks! I was looking for a summary as well from someone who understands that their take is just THEIR take. I find it funny that it seems like the most objective people are those that confront their subjectivity. And Isaac Saul seems to do it well here.
  - abrahamepton 5y ago
    Just read that and...there's nothing. Fauci's one of the most prominent people on the planet, dealing with one of the worst pandemics in recent human history, so I'd honestly expect his emails to contain way more interesting stuff than what the Tangle pulled out. If that's all there is, no wonder it's crickets from everybody except the right, who have an obvious interest in discrediting Fauci and a notable disinclination to give a shit about facts.
- abrahamepton 5y ago
  Was it massive? My impression was that it was exactly what you'd expect - basically a nothingburger, a few interesting tidbits, most of the sensational stuff was taken out of context and/or already known and/or flatly misrepresented. What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?
zwieback 5y ago
I read all those but consider them fairly partisan, at this point, e.g. they have to satisfy their clientele. I add Reuters and a few others like that to the mix but even that is difficult. Sometimes you have to search within the website to find coverage for specific stories and it's buried deeper down. I think the idea that media can be neutral is pretty unrealistic anyway. Even non-profits like PBS or government orgs like VOA will have their slant so it'll always require the extra work.
3pt14159 5y ago
If you like podcasts, try Left, Right & Center by KCRW. Their sister show All the Presidents' Lawyers is pretty good too, but what I like about LR&C is that it really does show multiple sides without a constant yelling fest. Sure there are the occasional "you don't really believe that do you?" moments, but it's largely civil.
Grim-444 5y ago
"They dont talk about or even cover the same things" - this is the number one fake news tactic in play. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's a 2x2 matrix - If a group is left-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the left and everything bad about the right, If a group is right-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the right and everything bad about the left. For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, and you'll almost never see Fox News write an article critical about Republicans. So you end up without much overlap between the two. They'll only report on the same things when those common things are important enough / loud enough to where they can't ignore it, or when they're able to put their own political interpretation on it when telling the viewer what to think.
- muyuu 5y ago
  Not only that, they go out of their way to police the topics in forums and social media. Mentioning the wrong topics gets people labelled as pushing "talking points" or "conspiracy theories" with total disregard to the factual reality behind. It doesn't serve the partisan narrative and that's all one needs to know. Insisting will get your suspended, muted, banned or deboosted/shadowbanned.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, Not true at all. Here's one critical about Democrats as being too beholden to progressives: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-progressive-kool-aid-wierson-honan/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro... Here’s one critical about the current Democratic VP largely for being too concerned with (and ultimately ineffective at) undercutting Republican talking points. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-progressive-kool-aid-wierson-honan/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro... And that's just one day. Except for stuff responding to new Trump-era revelations, they don't seem to have much current criticism of Republicans not buried within criticism of how Democrats deal with them, representing their actual bias in critical opinion coverage, in that it focuses on people currently in power. (When Republicans held the White House and the Senate, they had more direct criticism of Republicans.)
aeturnum 5y ago
>All of these make it real hard to compare viewpoints with a proper reference frame and even treatment. The thing I look for in good political writing isn't objectivity, which is mostly fictional, but an honest centering of perspective. This has two parts to me - a clear declaration about what the author thinks is the right answer and a commitment to making sure any opposing viewpoints are given as the holders of them would give them before being attacked. Like...I do think the US Republican party is not serious about many of their stated concerns, but I think it's easiest to see that when you contrast their stated views with their mostly political action. This can get a little distasteful with racist or other hateful views, but there's no need to go into detail with the views of the groups you are writing against. You just need to describe them in a way they can recognize before you tear them apart. So I guess I do not think good writing requires even treatment - it just requires demonstrating that you have understood what your opponents have said before you move to disagree with it. So, so, so much writing in US politics takes place between commentators who, for all appearances, have no real understanding of what their opponents want or why they might want it.
mrfusion 5y ago
IMO Comparing viewpoints isn’t as important as simply popping you out of the bubble. The key is to distrust the media more than you distrust the “other side”.
- bigbob2 5y ago
  Exactly. The reality is there almost always exists more than two viewpoints. Maybe it's not done deliberately, but this false dilemma may be a big reason the echo chamber effect is so powerful. I'll also acknowledge it's difficult to find reputable sources which present more than two viewpoints.
hliyan 5y ago
The other big problem is that there are important issues that neither side covers, except that is, until it is too late.
deleted 5y ago
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prepend 5y ago
I tried this for a while and then gave up and read no news whatsoever. For important issues, I’ll hear about it from friends and family in person. In the few situations where I wanted to learn more, it was such a slog to search and filter through garbage to find even the most simple facts (eg, what’s contained in recent us covid stimulus package) it’s just reinforced my decision that putting in routine work just to keep up on events isn’t worth it. Rage makes more ad money than facts.
gentleman11 5y ago
On Facebook it’s even worse. I’d you follow every political party plus some popular figures on every side during an election, you get nothing but extremism from every side. Literal right wing nazis as well as “burn it all down” leftists, at least a few years ago before I deleted my account.
crazygringo 5y ago
I highly recommend the Economist. Their articles mostly follow a dialectical format -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis, with about a third of the article spent on each one. I don't know of any other publication whose house style is so rigorous in this. It's also highly editorialized, but very open and transparent about the positions it takes -- any bias they have is in the open, but is in the final synthesis after they've treated both sides. It also doesn't fall neatly into any liberal/conservative divide. It tends to be socially progressive yet only interested in solutions that can be practically implemented, pro-free market but deeply concerned about externalities and the environment, pro-democracy but with hard-headed realpolitik. Plus probably half of what each weekly issue covers is news you won't find in any other American publication, at least -- it's a global publication and one of the best ways to simply learn about the entire world's political and economic news.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  The Economist skews conservative in the sense that it is who I wish the conservatives were.
  - bosswipe 5y ago
    I agree, it's a traditional conservative business view point: less regulation, free trade, free press, democratic government with a strong fair legal system.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    The Economist strikes me as very liberal, and not particularly conservative. And by that I mean the traditional definition of liberal, not Democratic-Party-of-the-US liberal.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Conservatism is a relative term. You can be a conservative right-winger, a conservative socialist, a conservative liberal or any other kind of conservative as long as your social situation fits it. Many articles by the Economist are conservative in that they intend to defend and conserve the status-quo, especially when dealing with foreign policy.
world_peace42 5y ago
Fivethirtyeight is not even remotely bipartisan. It’s hard to forget Nate’s role in spreading propaganda polls last election cycle and his reaction afterwards when it was clear they were all fake.
MarkMarine 5y ago
I struggle to understand why you need to read “sides” for news articles. Are you just referring to opinion pieces?
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  Because reporters and papers have biases. Here’s a simple one: Last year, when anti-asian crimes were on the rise, the NYTimes dutifully reported the crimes. But repeatedly omitted details like ethnicity or name, until a white attacker made the news. For those earlier details, the rag the NY Post (conservative and borderline tabloid) was the paper to go to. Eventually—as in many months after—the NY Times stated covering the full details because the problem was too obvious. Even then the Ny Times uses every opportunity to downplay the issue. I’m sure conservative journalists are just as biased in their own way.
- Loughla 5y ago
  Are you serious? Most mainstream sources have hard left or right slant. How do you not see that?
  - MarkMarine 5y ago
    Oh I see it, I just don’t want it and I think reading both sides gives you worse galaxy brain than reading none.
dfsegoat 5y ago
I cannot recommend the show and podcast 'Breaking Points', by Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball enough. They are top notch journalists who formerly hosted a daily news show called 'Rising' on The Hill, but left recently in order to be more independent and free of advertiser influence (censorship). While they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They cut through much of the partisan, mainstream BS - and get to the heart of many issues, all while debating ea. other in a civilized way. https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-k... It is INCREDIBLY refreshing, if you've fallen into the rut of mainstream internet or tv news.
- gre 5y ago
  Try the podcast Moderate Rebels as well. It's hosted by Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal from https://thegrayzone.com/ https://thegrayzone.com/ https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels
- ddingus 5y ago
  Seconded. I have avoided cable news for a long time now.
- stevenicr 5y ago
  agree. recently discovered them, very impressed. I think their new show has some kinks to work out and a bit more modernization of the graphics to put it back on par with how things they were doing were presented with their spots through "the Hill." Which I hope stay online to show how they are professional. I also hope their new show gets the graphics and tech to catch up quickly, as they are a refreshing source of truths that need to be told, and I'd like others to be able to watch and feel the same without being distracted and wondering if the new/current as of June 21 make them amateurs with uninformed opinions - instead of the professionals with the history and knowledge that some of us have become aware of. So glad to see them doing real and truth - we need more. When I caught part of on TV the other night with Sharyl Attkisson ( eg https://youtu.be/ol-6AwoPLH4?t=947 https://youtu.be/ol-6AwoPLH4?t=947 ) I had a similar - jaw drop - OMG someone is telling the truth and they are on the air and not in a mysterious car accident! This is amazing. EX-CNN aparrently(?) - maybe it's going to be a new movement of like ex-X-cult - no longer beholden to Y - Perhaps old media is not just losing but started to be lost. I want a browser extension to highlight individual reporters and info about past biases - as it's too hard to pin a portal as being one way or the other, when there are shills mixed in with regular reporters and editors all mucking up everything it seems.
smegcicle 5y ago
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. https://ground.news https://ground.news has an interface that highlights which news outlets with what general bias are covering which stories, which is sometimes fun to take a look at
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Not everything is worthy of reporting. I definitely don't align with every NYT article that I read but that's the beauty of it imo. After quitting reddit I'm often oblivious to clickbait flamebait minutiae that my colleagues all get worked up over. Also- are there any reputable conservative print news sources?
cbsmith 5y ago
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. The coverage/focus is the perspective.
duxup 5y ago
What is "the other side" ? Is it some fake news site, or some radio personality's take? Or is it some twitter spat / spam? I don't think 'the other side' is all that simple to cover / has an obvious quantity to include with every news article.
danbmil99 5y ago
I think the internet's control over what you give your attention to is a major factor that has not received enough attention, so to speak.
losvedir 5y ago
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things Yeah, this is a key thing to realize. People seem to think that Fox News, for example, just trots out falsehoods all the time, but if you skim the news, I'd say very little is actually factually incorrect. It's more about the story selection, who they choose to interview to get the quote, how they contextualize (or don't) statistics, etc. But once you realize that, you realize it can apply to, e.g. WaPo, which many Republicans say is very left-biased, while many Democrats say it's neutral. I think an amusing non-partisan example of how story selection biases viewpoints is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0] where for whatever reason shark attacks became a part of the summer's zeitgeist and got extensively covered. Meanwhile, shark attacks weren't at any particularly elevated level, contrary to what many people ended up believing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark
- boredprograming 5y ago
  Fox New's actual news coverage is mostly truthful. But a huge amount of their airtime is opinion pieces and media personalities who spout BS all day. Tucker Carlson is probably the most notorious. Plus they have Republican politicians calling in and showing up constantly, and they're allowed to say whatever they want.
  - tw04 5y ago
    I won't say Fox is the only one guilty of it, but they intentionally mix what would best be described as "opinion pieces" with "real news" and don't really make any effort to draw a clear line between the two. The end result is as disastrous as one would expect when taking someone's personal opinion and selling it as a factual source of news.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    We don't even have to litigate whether Fox News airtime is distinctively malignant if we just acknowledge that all 24/7 cable news channels are bad. They kind of have to be, just by the nature of how they compete and what they have to work with in both audiences and source material. Just don't get your news from the TV.
throwaway6734 5y ago
I've found that looking at higher level, more commentary based news sources helps. Some examples: Persuasion, The Dispatch, The Bulwark, and an assortment of substacks. I get my news from Reuters with a sprinkling of fox/nytimes/reddit thrown in
bnralt 5y ago
I highly recommend experimenting with turning off the news completely for a time. You quickly find that the vast majority of "Breaking News!" that gets shoveled out simply isn't that important for most people, and is there mainly to feed a news addiction. Alternatively, use the Internet Archives to read news from this date from 2-5 few years ago. You'll probably find that most aren't worth reading, which gives you a good sense of how important the news you read today will seem in just a few years.
rytcio 5y ago
I started to pay really close attention to political news back in 2015/2016. There was this crazy phenomenon during the Trump administration where both sides felt like the other side was living in an alternate reality. The truth is that news sources for each side presented completely different stories. While one side got a certain story, the other side was completely silent. So you had two groups of people who had two different sets of unrelated stories, and very rarely did they overlap. The media did an amazing job of putting each group into their own silo, making it impossible to discuss anything between groups or for any positive Trump news to ever be known to a large percentage of the population.
dandersh 5y ago
"They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across." I've noticed this as well. Going from WaPo to Breitbart (or vice versa) is like going to an alternate world. When they are talking about the same thing often they are doing so in a belittling manner (https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/11/13/safety-pin-anti-trump-protesters-adopt-diaper-symbol/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/11/13/safety-pin-ant...). I feel like the tone taken by MSM outlets like WaPo and the NYT has become harsher and more condescending, but it could just be me paying closer attention to it. Bias by exclusion doesn't get talked about as much as it should. One way you can tell when a media establishment doesn't like something is that they do what they can to ignore it. During the Dem primaries it had become a meme in some left wing communities the length the MSM was going to ignore Bernie and his popularity. Another popular example is how Noam Chomsky is largely shunned by the MSM.
gexla 5y ago
Maybe they don't cover the same things because the "things" are like their flags they are using to signal each other. It's like two different gangs using different symbolism to communicate with their own members. They don't need to talk to the other side, they need to instead rally their own side. Maybe study each side like you're studying a gang. Get to know the symbolism and language.
- medicineman 5y ago
  Please, the closest most of the posters here have been to a gang is a WuTang music video.
takeda 5y ago
From my observation they (at least Fox News) do report on all the same things, they just made the articles not fitting their agenda buried deep in their websites, and on their TV channel they don't report it, or just quickly mention it on their non opinion segments.
nitwit005 5y ago
You can't always even get supportive viewpoints of some policies. If some policy is too unpopular with the base, they seem to just get very quiet about it, or discuss it in very general terms.
swiley 5y ago
IMO: any organization employing "journalists" is engaging in mass manipulation for hire at this point (both left and right.)
deleted 5y ago
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wutbrodo 5y ago
It's difficult because you're so drastically limiting your sources (to ones that are all low-quality IMO). Every time you read an article and care about the topic, just.... Google it. There are a thousand and one independent sources, Twitter threads, etc etc etc. I don't consider myself to truly understand any binary debate unless I've heard an intelligent argument on both sides; it's just not my experience that any interesting discussion has a side that's literally meaningless (though I'm perhaps begging the question by not finding eg Pizzagate "interesting").
jrm4 5y ago
Right. Because of these news sources are BUSINESSES. Their job is to manage their own "image" to keep people around for the advertisers. Like it or not (me, not) this is a much easier way to grok what's going on with them. Their priority is viewers -- mostly retaining them. So you keep with the general idea that "you should tell the truth" by choosing which truths to tell, and then perhaps "gambling" by once in a while doing something outrageous that will excite the base.
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
All the sources you listed are at least somewhat pro-authoritarian. Recommend reason.com to round it out.
merpnderp 5y ago
Modern journalism is about covering the most important stories... With a pillow... Until they go away.
liveoneggs 5y ago
just watch C-SPAN and cut out the crap; then compare coverage of the same speech or event or whatever. All of the media will pick out single words from an hours-long talk and invent their own context, ignoring the rest of the hour
rayiner 5y ago
Bloomberg and Politico are great. Also recommend TheHill and RealClearPolitics. There’s a growing number of writers on sub stack covering the same issue from different sides. Often this is formulated as a response of rebuttal to the left-leaning media’s coverage of the issue, but that’s fine because you still get both sides of the story if you read things in conjunction.
arecurrence 5y ago
Ground News handles aggregating and showing each source that is discussing the same topic event. It has become the first site I go to for news and from there I can easily access virtually everything else while knowing what the perspective that I'm stepping into is in advance.
marvindanig 5y ago
I recommend the newsletter The Flipside [1] by Annafi Wahed. She and the team are doing an amazing job bringing the two sides together. Shout out to Annafi– how are you all doing there?! [1] https://www.theflipside.io/ https://www.theflipside.io/
godelski 5y ago
> The border crisis is a good example of this. In my experience, the biggest contributor to the echo chambers is a lack of memory. I do not think people's memories are bad, but rather they willfully ignore the other party's position, never learned it in the first place, or are justifying it because their party is in power. This is what centrists frequently get mocked at "both sides" about. They aren't saying "oh both sides are trying to stage an insurrection" they are saying "both sides are not going to let immigrants across the border" (but it'll be generalized to everything being both sided). I think the way to cure this is also the way to make parties better. Criticism. We should always critique our parties to make them better. Unless you believe they are perfect already and getting direct commands from god, it is deserving of criticism. But we've encouraged a culture where criticism isn't (effectively) allowed. It is allowed by certain people who speak in a certain way, but not for the average person. (e.g. if you are speaking to someone you don't know that well and politics are brought up and you criticize something x party recently did it will be presumed you are of the opposing side). I believe part of this is because we are comparing politicians and parties rather than judging them independently (this is also why I'm a big supporter of Cardinal voting as opposed to the common Ordinal propositions). This is essentially the root of whataboutism. The classic example is one I had my parents many times over the last decade. I suggest Trump should be investigated for his connections to Epstein given his frequent contact. And my dad would be like "but what about Clinton!" and my response has always been "yeah, him too." Because it isn't about parties, it is about the crime that was potentially committed. If something is bad, then it is bad if the other party does it or if your party does it. Tribes don't matter. The whataboutism is just a distraction technique. TLDR: Don't forget the past. Criticize everyone. Stop saying "what about...".
mesh 5y ago
I would suggest reading some sources outside the US. Specifically, I would recommend the Economist. While the Economist has a very distinct view, it does provide a little higher level, distanced view of US and world politics. It has highlighted to me some biases from some of the sources I follow on a day by day basis (NYT, Washington Post). Bonus points for the Economist, because you also get coverage and analysis of events across the world many of which get almost 0 coverage in US press.
ptero 5y ago
I tried this, too and realized similar things. I then decided that I do not really care (at least not that much) about understanding which way each source wants to spin things. I instead want information about the world to form my own opinions. I started reading international news. That is, focus on publications outside country X when reading about X. Reports from Sweden, Korea, Russia and UK (thanks google translate!) translated into English, awkward wording and all, plus a minimal dose of CNN and Fox works better for me than a mix of American media. Just my 2c. I might even wrap it up as a convenient page or app.
jkingsbery 5y ago
I've done something similar. If you look at what, say, the National Review thinks is important on a given day, and compare that to what the NYTimes is reporting on, it's pretty clear that we're not merely disagreeing about a particular set of facts, we're living on different planets.
mdoms 5y ago
> I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. Those are the sources you tried to balance with? Every one of those is a fringe hard-leaning source, except maybe Wapo which can't be trusted because it's owned by Bezos. You need to seek more moderate sources to begin with.
- bena 5y ago
  The New York Times and Washington Post are newspapers of record. That's hardly "fringe".
deleted 5y ago
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baybal2 5y ago
When I was living in Canada, I managed to get myself to caucuses of Christy Clarke though I wasn't even a citizen. Still have few photos of me in a $20 Chinese suit feeling very odd in the setting of the Vancouver club. It's amazing how much scoop you can get on both the establishment, and the opposition from first hands. Just ask, politicians are talkative types. You are blessed with living in a country where you don't end on the bottom of a lake for asking politician a wrong question.
ajoy 5y ago
We (The Factual: https://www.thefactual.com https://www.thefactual.com) have been trying to solve this issue. Our tech ingests articles from different publishers, groups them into topics based on the story they are covering, then analyze and score them based on how informative they are and present curated articles as best perspectives from left/right/center. All of this automated and running continuously on our website : https://www.thefactual.com/news https://www.thefactual.com/news and also in our app : iOS (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-factual/id1537259360 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-factual/id1537259360) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=group.thefactual.mobile https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=group.thefactu...) Do check us out.

dev_by_day 5y ago

This site is great for trying to get different takes https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news I used to do what you did(just read a bunch of major publications from differing political orientations) but also found issue with not being able to compare different perspectives easily.

brlewis 5y ago
Allsides is prominently featured in the article.
- medicineman 5y ago
  >implying they read the articles
- dev_by_day 5y ago
  yes! I meant it more as a +1 to allsides but should have clarified that.
andrepd 5y ago
I'm a bit disappointed that outlets like NTY, or Associated Press for cryin out loud, are branded as "Left". Disappointing that actual Left-wing discourse is so outside currently acceptable Overton window.

lostapathy 5y ago

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, This is a big issue. But at the same time - it's not clear to me what the solution when every side is pushing hype rather than news. How do you publish an "opposing take" on something the other side is publishing that isn't real in the first place? It's not ideal to even acknowledge lies.

throwaway894345 5y ago

I do the same thing, and I've noticed that this "they don't present the other side" thing is getting worse with time. I recently read [this HuffPo article][0] about how only 1% of American film characters are identifiably Muslim; however, nowhere in the article does it even mention the share of Americans who are Muslim, nor the share of movie characters that are of other religions. These things are certainly obvious and important points of context, but the article doesn't even broach them. (According to [1], only 1% of Americans are Muslim, and 60+% are Christian--and I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian never mind [how they are portrayed][2]) Worse, this seems to be increasingly prevalent in the academy as well. Indeed, the study cited in the article (from University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative) also doesn't mention these points of context and the paper is pretty overtly propagandist. [0]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/movie-characters-muslim-riz-ahmed_n_60c2072ce4b0af343e9cc2eb https://www.huffpost.com/entry/movie-characters-muslim-riz-a... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States [2]: http://decentfilms.com/articles/hollywood-religion-problem http://decentfilms.com/articles/hollywood-religion-problem

pmoriarty 5y ago
"(According to [1], only 1% of Americans are Muslim, and 60+% are Christian--and I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian never mind [how they are portrayed][2])" Yet both Muslims and Christians are in the news a lot, and there's a lot of political discussion about them. It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes, wouldn't you agree?
- burnished 5y ago
  for me, personally, absolutely not. I want thoughtful portrayal of character in media that I consume, but am in no way desiring yet more religious representation.
  - XorNot 5y ago

pmoriarty 5y ago

"They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives" Check out Counterspin, from the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).[1] They monitor mainstream media and critique it from a left-wing perspective. [1] - https://fair.org/counterspin/ https://fair.org/counterspin/

rainingmonkey 5y ago
Seconding counterspin! I don't always agree with them ideologically, but I find it valuable to hear a perspective on US politics & media from outside the usual Right/Center-Right binary.

vmception 5y ago

www.allsides.com They compare similar headlines and also show you what you might have missed because one side doesn't even surface the headline Edit: this article is about allsides, if you read it

nickthegreek 5y ago

Ive recently started reading the Tangle newsletter. It’s a daily drop that focuses on 1 topic and provides the left, right and their take on an issue. https://www.readtangle.com/ https://www.readtangle.com/

jkubicek 5y ago
I've been a subscriber to Tangle for a while now and I love his takes on the news. He operates just a little to the right of my own political persuasions, but even when I disagree with him, it's a respectful disagreement. Isaac's positions are nuanced, well-reasonsed and kind. That newsletter is exactly what we all wish political debate in the US was like.
- zucked 5y ago
  Thanks for this suggestion - Hadn't seen this before but previewed and really liked what I saw. Sub'd.
alisonatwork 5y ago
I unsubscribed from that newsletter a few months ago when I realized it was just perpetuating the problem by reporting on "both sides", even in cases where there wasn't much worth talking about on either "side". It's interesting if you would like to understand what propaganda the elites in each political party would like their base to digest, but it's not very interesting if you just want to see what actually happened on a particular day. Someone on Hacker News a while back recommended the Wikipedia current events portal[0] and I have to say this feels like a more efficient way to consume the news. It feels less tied to trending topics and manufactured drama, and is more centered on what actually happened in the world that was especially notable on a particular day. I feel like a lot of "news" that's reported in the American political media is just ideological argument, which after you've read the same argument for the nth time doesn't come across as very interesting any more. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

threatofrain 5y ago

Google News gives you precisely this portfolio of vendors. Why would anyone subscribe to a single news vendor? I'd also advise adding WION, Al Jazeera, Axios, and The Guardian + BBC.

makomk 5y ago
The Guardian and the BBC basically represent the same political faction as say the New York Times and CNN in the USA, except obviously with more focus on UK stories. You can even see the overlap when they report on stories from the other country.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  Inter-rater reliability is very useful. You don't simply seek novelty, right? Not having the vocabulary to discuss the agreement and disagreement of the BBC or the Guardian would be a mistake if you want to talk about news fluency, as they have made a name for themselves in the west.
  - unknown_error 5y ago
    The BBC and the Guardian do differ on takes, but both are very far cry from the right-leaning outlets. Both are part of the same left-leaning echo chamber in that nobody on the right trusts either source. Good luck getting a Breitbart/Newsmax reader to switch to even the NY Times or Reuters or AP, much less The Guardian.
smt88 5y ago
Google News is a dumpster fire. They include Sputnik and other govt propaganda sites from oppressive regimes.
- unknown_error 5y ago
  It's gotten significantly worse over time. Are there better alternatives that collate news, by topic, from multiple sources? Newsvoice was an app that tried to crowdsource that job instead of using algorithms. It very quickly became an alt-right cesspool, presumably because those are the same people who feel disenfranchised by FAKE NEWS LIBERAL MEDIA and so flock to alternative communities.

nateberkopec 5y ago

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives I remember seeing Twitter chatter from the right re: the Fauci email dump, and so I went on various liberal outlets to try to get the left-wing perspective, and it was complete crickets. Especially when it's something I can't just read and form an opinion on myself (Fauci's email dump was absolutely massive), I depend on journalists to accurately summarize and contextualize primary sources. And it's really hard to get a straight take when one side won't even bother to write a "this is a nothingburger, here's why" article.

arcticfox 5y ago
From someone else's link, this Tangle site seems pretty solid. Specifically on Fauci's emails: https://www.readtangle.com/p/dr-anthony-fauci-emails-coronavirus https://www.readtangle.com/p/dr-anthony-fauci-emails-coronav...
- my_usernam3 5y ago
  Thanks! I was looking for a summary as well from someone who understands that their take is just THEIR take. I find it funny that it seems like the most objective people are those that confront their subjectivity. And Isaac Saul seems to do it well here.
- abrahamepton 5y ago
  Just read that and...there's nothing. Fauci's one of the most prominent people on the planet, dealing with one of the worst pandemics in recent human history, so I'd honestly expect his emails to contain way more interesting stuff than what the Tangle pulled out. If that's all there is, no wonder it's crickets from everybody except the right, who have an obvious interest in discrediting Fauci and a notable disinclination to give a shit about facts.
abrahamepton 5y ago
Was it massive? My impression was that it was exactly what you'd expect - basically a nothingburger, a few interesting tidbits, most of the sensational stuff was taken out of context and/or already known and/or flatly misrepresented. What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?

zwieback 5y ago

I read all those but consider them fairly partisan, at this point, e.g. they have to satisfy their clientele. I add Reuters and a few others like that to the mix but even that is difficult. Sometimes you have to search within the website to find coverage for specific stories and it's buried deeper down. I think the idea that media can be neutral is pretty unrealistic anyway. Even non-profits like PBS or government orgs like VOA will have their slant so it'll always require the extra work.

3pt14159 5y ago

If you like podcasts, try Left, Right & Center by KCRW. Their sister show All the Presidents' Lawyers is pretty good too, but what I like about LR&C is that it really does show multiple sides without a constant yelling fest. Sure there are the occasional "you don't really believe that do you?" moments, but it's largely civil.

Grim-444 5y ago

"They dont talk about or even cover the same things" - this is the number one fake news tactic in play. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's a 2x2 matrix - If a group is left-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the left and everything bad about the right, If a group is right-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the right and everything bad about the left. For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, and you'll almost never see Fox News write an article critical about Republicans. So you end up without much overlap between the two. They'll only report on the same things when those common things are important enough / loud enough to where they can't ignore it, or when they're able to put their own political interpretation on it when telling the viewer what to think.

muyuu 5y ago
Not only that, they go out of their way to police the topics in forums and social media. Mentioning the wrong topics gets people labelled as pushing "talking points" or "conspiracy theories" with total disregard to the factual reality behind. It doesn't serve the partisan narrative and that's all one needs to know. Insisting will get your suspended, muted, banned or deboosted/shadowbanned.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, Not true at all. Here's one critical about Democrats as being too beholden to progressives: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-progressive-kool-aid-wierson-honan/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro... Here’s one critical about the current Democratic VP largely for being too concerned with (and ultimately ineffective at) undercutting Republican talking points. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-progressive-kool-aid-wierson-honan/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro... And that's just one day. Except for stuff responding to new Trump-era revelations, they don't seem to have much current criticism of Republicans not buried within criticism of how Democrats deal with them, representing their actual bias in critical opinion coverage, in that it focuses on people currently in power. (When Republicans held the White House and the Senate, they had more direct criticism of Republicans.)

aeturnum 5y ago

>All of these make it real hard to compare viewpoints with a proper reference frame and even treatment. The thing I look for in good political writing isn't objectivity, which is mostly fictional, but an honest centering of perspective. This has two parts to me - a clear declaration about what the author thinks is the right answer and a commitment to making sure any opposing viewpoints are given as the holders of them would give them before being attacked. Like...I do think the US Republican party is not serious about many of their stated concerns, but I think it's easiest to see that when you contrast their stated views with their mostly political action. This can get a little distasteful with racist or other hateful views, but there's no need to go into detail with the views of the groups you are writing against. You just need to describe them in a way they can recognize before you tear them apart. So I guess I do not think good writing requires even treatment - it just requires demonstrating that you have understood what your opponents have said before you move to disagree with it. So, so, so much writing in US politics takes place between commentators who, for all appearances, have no real understanding of what their opponents want or why they might want it.

mrfusion 5y ago

IMO Comparing viewpoints isn’t as important as simply popping you out of the bubble. The key is to distrust the media more than you distrust the “other side”.

bigbob2 5y ago
Exactly. The reality is there almost always exists more than two viewpoints. Maybe it's not done deliberately, but this false dilemma may be a big reason the echo chamber effect is so powerful. I'll also acknowledge it's difficult to find reputable sources which present more than two viewpoints.

hliyan 5y ago

The other big problem is that there are important issues that neither side covers, except that is, until it is too late.

deleted 5y ago

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prepend 5y ago

I tried this for a while and then gave up and read no news whatsoever. For important issues, I’ll hear about it from friends and family in person. In the few situations where I wanted to learn more, it was such a slog to search and filter through garbage to find even the most simple facts (eg, what’s contained in recent us covid stimulus package) it’s just reinforced my decision that putting in routine work just to keep up on events isn’t worth it. Rage makes more ad money than facts.

gentleman11 5y ago

On Facebook it’s even worse. I’d you follow every political party plus some popular figures on every side during an election, you get nothing but extremism from every side. Literal right wing nazis as well as “burn it all down” leftists, at least a few years ago before I deleted my account.

crazygringo 5y ago

I highly recommend the Economist. Their articles mostly follow a dialectical format -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis, with about a third of the article spent on each one. I don't know of any other publication whose house style is so rigorous in this. It's also highly editorialized, but very open and transparent about the positions it takes -- any bias they have is in the open, but is in the final synthesis after they've treated both sides. It also doesn't fall neatly into any liberal/conservative divide. It tends to be socially progressive yet only interested in solutions that can be practically implemented, pro-free market but deeply concerned about externalities and the environment, pro-democracy but with hard-headed realpolitik. Plus probably half of what each weekly issue covers is news you won't find in any other American publication, at least -- it's a global publication and one of the best ways to simply learn about the entire world's political and economic news.

whimsicalism 5y ago
The Economist skews conservative in the sense that it is who I wish the conservatives were.
- bosswipe 5y ago
  I agree, it's a traditional conservative business view point: less regulation, free trade, free press, democratic government with a strong fair legal system.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  The Economist strikes me as very liberal, and not particularly conservative. And by that I mean the traditional definition of liberal, not Democratic-Party-of-the-US liberal.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Conservatism is a relative term. You can be a conservative right-winger, a conservative socialist, a conservative liberal or any other kind of conservative as long as your social situation fits it. Many articles by the Economist are conservative in that they intend to defend and conserve the status-quo, especially when dealing with foreign policy.

world_peace42 5y ago

Fivethirtyeight is not even remotely bipartisan. It’s hard to forget Nate’s role in spreading propaganda polls last election cycle and his reaction afterwards when it was clear they were all fake.

MarkMarine 5y ago

I struggle to understand why you need to read “sides” for news articles. Are you just referring to opinion pieces?

nobodyandproud 5y ago
Because reporters and papers have biases. Here’s a simple one: Last year, when anti-asian crimes were on the rise, the NYTimes dutifully reported the crimes. But repeatedly omitted details like ethnicity or name, until a white attacker made the news. For those earlier details, the rag the NY Post (conservative and borderline tabloid) was the paper to go to. Eventually—as in many months after—the NY Times stated covering the full details because the problem was too obvious. Even then the Ny Times uses every opportunity to downplay the issue. I’m sure conservative journalists are just as biased in their own way.
Loughla 5y ago
Are you serious? Most mainstream sources have hard left or right slant. How do you not see that?
- MarkMarine 5y ago
  Oh I see it, I just don’t want it and I think reading both sides gives you worse galaxy brain than reading none.

dfsegoat 5y ago

I cannot recommend the show and podcast 'Breaking Points', by Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball enough. They are top notch journalists who formerly hosted a daily news show called 'Rising' on The Hill, but left recently in order to be more independent and free of advertiser influence (censorship). While they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They cut through much of the partisan, mainstream BS - and get to the heart of many issues, all while debating ea. other in a civilized way. https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-k... It is INCREDIBLY refreshing, if you've fallen into the rut of mainstream internet or tv news.

gre 5y ago
Try the podcast Moderate Rebels as well. It's hosted by Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal from https://thegrayzone.com/ https://thegrayzone.com/ https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels
ddingus 5y ago
Seconded. I have avoided cable news for a long time now.
stevenicr 5y ago
agree. recently discovered them, very impressed. I think their new show has some kinks to work out and a bit more modernization of the graphics to put it back on par with how things they were doing were presented with their spots through "the Hill." Which I hope stay online to show how they are professional. I also hope their new show gets the graphics and tech to catch up quickly, as they are a refreshing source of truths that need to be told, and I'd like others to be able to watch and feel the same without being distracted and wondering if the new/current as of June 21 make them amateurs with uninformed opinions - instead of the professionals with the history and knowledge that some of us have become aware of. So glad to see them doing real and truth - we need more. When I caught part of on TV the other night with Sharyl Attkisson ( eg https://youtu.be/ol-6AwoPLH4?t=947 https://youtu.be/ol-6AwoPLH4?t=947 ) I had a similar - jaw drop - OMG someone is telling the truth and they are on the air and not in a mysterious car accident! This is amazing. EX-CNN aparrently(?) - maybe it's going to be a new movement of like ex-X-cult - no longer beholden to Y - Perhaps old media is not just losing but started to be lost. I want a browser extension to highlight individual reporters and info about past biases - as it's too hard to pin a portal as being one way or the other, when there are shills mixed in with regular reporters and editors all mucking up everything it seems.

smegcicle 5y ago

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. https://ground.news https://ground.news has an interface that highlights which news outlets with what general bias are covering which stories, which is sometimes fun to take a look at

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Not everything is worthy of reporting. I definitely don't align with every NYT article that I read but that's the beauty of it imo. After quitting reddit I'm often oblivious to clickbait flamebait minutiae that my colleagues all get worked up over. Also- are there any reputable conservative print news sources?

cbsmith 5y ago

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. The coverage/focus is the perspective.

duxup 5y ago

What is "the other side" ? Is it some fake news site, or some radio personality's take? Or is it some twitter spat / spam? I don't think 'the other side' is all that simple to cover / has an obvious quantity to include with every news article.

danbmil99 5y ago

I think the internet's control over what you give your attention to is a major factor that has not received enough attention, so to speak.

losvedir 5y ago

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things Yeah, this is a key thing to realize. People seem to think that Fox News, for example, just trots out falsehoods all the time, but if you skim the news, I'd say very little is actually factually incorrect. It's more about the story selection, who they choose to interview to get the quote, how they contextualize (or don't) statistics, etc. But once you realize that, you realize it can apply to, e.g. WaPo, which many Republicans say is very left-biased, while many Democrats say it's neutral. I think an amusing non-partisan example of how story selection biases viewpoints is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0] where for whatever reason shark attacks became a part of the summer's zeitgeist and got extensively covered. Meanwhile, shark attacks weren't at any particularly elevated level, contrary to what many people ended up believing. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark

boredprograming 5y ago
Fox New's actual news coverage is mostly truthful. But a huge amount of their airtime is opinion pieces and media personalities who spout BS all day. Tucker Carlson is probably the most notorious. Plus they have Republican politicians calling in and showing up constantly, and they're allowed to say whatever they want.
- tw04 5y ago
  I won't say Fox is the only one guilty of it, but they intentionally mix what would best be described as "opinion pieces" with "real news" and don't really make any effort to draw a clear line between the two. The end result is as disastrous as one would expect when taking someone's personal opinion and selling it as a factual source of news.
- tptacek 5y ago
  We don't even have to litigate whether Fox News airtime is distinctively malignant if we just acknowledge that all 24/7 cable news channels are bad. They kind of have to be, just by the nature of how they compete and what they have to work with in both audiences and source material. Just don't get your news from the TV.

throwaway6734 5y ago

I've found that looking at higher level, more commentary based news sources helps. Some examples: Persuasion, The Dispatch, The Bulwark, and an assortment of substacks. I get my news from Reuters with a sprinkling of fox/nytimes/reddit thrown in

bnralt 5y ago

I highly recommend experimenting with turning off the news completely for a time. You quickly find that the vast majority of "Breaking News!" that gets shoveled out simply isn't that important for most people, and is there mainly to feed a news addiction. Alternatively, use the Internet Archives to read news from this date from 2-5 few years ago. You'll probably find that most aren't worth reading, which gives you a good sense of how important the news you read today will seem in just a few years.

rytcio 5y ago

I started to pay really close attention to political news back in 2015/2016. There was this crazy phenomenon during the Trump administration where both sides felt like the other side was living in an alternate reality. The truth is that news sources for each side presented completely different stories. While one side got a certain story, the other side was completely silent. So you had two groups of people who had two different sets of unrelated stories, and very rarely did they overlap. The media did an amazing job of putting each group into their own silo, making it impossible to discuss anything between groups or for any positive Trump news to ever be known to a large percentage of the population.

dandersh 5y ago

"They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across." I've noticed this as well. Going from WaPo to Breitbart (or vice versa) is like going to an alternate world. When they are talking about the same thing often they are doing so in a belittling manner (https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/11/13/safety-pin-anti-trump-protesters-adopt-diaper-symbol/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/11/13/safety-pin-ant...). I feel like the tone taken by MSM outlets like WaPo and the NYT has become harsher and more condescending, but it could just be me paying closer attention to it. Bias by exclusion doesn't get talked about as much as it should. One way you can tell when a media establishment doesn't like something is that they do what they can to ignore it. During the Dem primaries it had become a meme in some left wing communities the length the MSM was going to ignore Bernie and his popularity. Another popular example is how Noam Chomsky is largely shunned by the MSM.

gexla 5y ago

Maybe they don't cover the same things because the "things" are like their flags they are using to signal each other. It's like two different gangs using different symbolism to communicate with their own members. They don't need to talk to the other side, they need to instead rally their own side. Maybe study each side like you're studying a gang. Get to know the symbolism and language.

medicineman 5y ago
Please, the closest most of the posters here have been to a gang is a WuTang music video.

takeda 5y ago

From my observation they (at least Fox News) do report on all the same things, they just made the articles not fitting their agenda buried deep in their websites, and on their TV channel they don't report it, or just quickly mention it on their non opinion segments.

nitwit005 5y ago

You can't always even get supportive viewpoints of some policies. If some policy is too unpopular with the base, they seem to just get very quiet about it, or discuss it in very general terms.

swiley 5y ago

IMO: any organization employing "journalists" is engaging in mass manipulation for hire at this point (both left and right.)

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wutbrodo 5y ago

It's difficult because you're so drastically limiting your sources (to ones that are all low-quality IMO). Every time you read an article and care about the topic, just.... Google it. There are a thousand and one independent sources, Twitter threads, etc etc etc. I don't consider myself to truly understand any binary debate unless I've heard an intelligent argument on both sides; it's just not my experience that any interesting discussion has a side that's literally meaningless (though I'm perhaps begging the question by not finding eg Pizzagate "interesting").

jrm4 5y ago

Right. Because of these news sources are BUSINESSES. Their job is to manage their own "image" to keep people around for the advertisers. Like it or not (me, not) this is a much easier way to grok what's going on with them. Their priority is viewers -- mostly retaining them. So you keep with the general idea that "you should tell the truth" by choosing which truths to tell, and then perhaps "gambling" by once in a while doing something outrageous that will excite the base.

ErikVandeWater 5y ago

All the sources you listed are at least somewhat pro-authoritarian. Recommend reason.com to round it out.

merpnderp 5y ago

Modern journalism is about covering the most important stories... With a pillow... Until they go away.

liveoneggs 5y ago

just watch C-SPAN and cut out the crap; then compare coverage of the same speech or event or whatever. All of the media will pick out single words from an hours-long talk and invent their own context, ignoring the rest of the hour

rayiner 5y ago

Bloomberg and Politico are great. Also recommend TheHill and RealClearPolitics. There’s a growing number of writers on sub stack covering the same issue from different sides. Often this is formulated as a response of rebuttal to the left-leaning media’s coverage of the issue, but that’s fine because you still get both sides of the story if you read things in conjunction.

arecurrence 5y ago

Ground News handles aggregating and showing each source that is discussing the same topic event. It has become the first site I go to for news and from there I can easily access virtually everything else while knowing what the perspective that I'm stepping into is in advance.

marvindanig 5y ago

I recommend the newsletter The Flipside [1] by Annafi Wahed. She and the team are doing an amazing job bringing the two sides together. Shout out to Annafi– how are you all doing there?! [1] https://www.theflipside.io/ https://www.theflipside.io/

godelski 5y ago

> The border crisis is a good example of this. In my experience, the biggest contributor to the echo chambers is a lack of memory. I do not think people's memories are bad, but rather they willfully ignore the other party's position, never learned it in the first place, or are justifying it because their party is in power. This is what centrists frequently get mocked at "both sides" about. They aren't saying "oh both sides are trying to stage an insurrection" they are saying "both sides are not going to let immigrants across the border" (but it'll be generalized to everything being both sided). I think the way to cure this is also the way to make parties better. Criticism. We should always critique our parties to make them better. Unless you believe they are perfect already and getting direct commands from god, it is deserving of criticism. But we've encouraged a culture where criticism isn't (effectively) allowed. It is allowed by certain people who speak in a certain way, but not for the average person. (e.g. if you are speaking to someone you don't know that well and politics are brought up and you criticize something x party recently did it will be presumed you are of the opposing side). I believe part of this is because we are comparing politicians and parties rather than judging them independently (this is also why I'm a big supporter of Cardinal voting as opposed to the common Ordinal propositions). This is essentially the root of whataboutism. The classic example is one I had my parents many times over the last decade. I suggest Trump should be investigated for his connections to Epstein given his frequent contact. And my dad would be like "but what about Clinton!" and my response has always been "yeah, him too." Because it isn't about parties, it is about the crime that was potentially committed. If something is bad, then it is bad if the other party does it or if your party does it. Tribes don't matter. The whataboutism is just a distraction technique. TLDR: Don't forget the past. Criticize everyone. Stop saying "what about...".

mesh 5y ago

I would suggest reading some sources outside the US. Specifically, I would recommend the Economist. While the Economist has a very distinct view, it does provide a little higher level, distanced view of US and world politics. It has highlighted to me some biases from some of the sources I follow on a day by day basis (NYT, Washington Post). Bonus points for the Economist, because you also get coverage and analysis of events across the world many of which get almost 0 coverage in US press.

ptero 5y ago

I tried this, too and realized similar things. I then decided that I do not really care (at least not that much) about understanding which way each source wants to spin things. I instead want information about the world to form my own opinions. I started reading international news. That is, focus on publications outside country X when reading about X. Reports from Sweden, Korea, Russia and UK (thanks google translate!) translated into English, awkward wording and all, plus a minimal dose of CNN and Fox works better for me than a mix of American media. Just my 2c. I might even wrap it up as a convenient page or app.

jkingsbery 5y ago

I've done something similar. If you look at what, say, the National Review thinks is important on a given day, and compare that to what the NYTimes is reporting on, it's pretty clear that we're not merely disagreeing about a particular set of facts, we're living on different planets.

mdoms 5y ago

> I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. Those are the sources you tried to balance with? Every one of those is a fringe hard-leaning source, except maybe Wapo which can't be trusted because it's owned by Bezos. You need to seek more moderate sources to begin with.

bena 5y ago
The New York Times and Washington Post are newspapers of record. That's hardly "fringe".

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baybal2 5y ago

When I was living in Canada, I managed to get myself to caucuses of Christy Clarke though I wasn't even a citizen. Still have few photos of me in a $20 Chinese suit feeling very odd in the setting of the Vancouver club. It's amazing how much scoop you can get on both the establishment, and the opposition from first hands. Just ask, politicians are talkative types. You are blessed with living in a country where you don't end on the bottom of a lake for asking politician a wrong question.

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