best source of unbiased news...

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TrollFromDownBelow
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best source of unbiased news...

Post by TrollFromDownBelow » Wed Aug 02, 2017 7:56 pm

What is the most neutral new source out there? USA Today is on a trump rampage (note.... I am NOT a trump supporter). Do I need to say anything about Fox? Where does one go today to get unbiased (or at least balanced reporting) news? I typically look at the Detroit Free Press (gotta get my local news...owned by USA Today) what WSJ allows me to read for free, and NPR.
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SlowLane
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by SlowLane » Thu Aug 03, 2017 6:03 am

Ya might need to look outside the USA. Try BBC or CBC?

Keeping in mind that there is no such thing as unbiased reporting. But looking at things from the outsiders' point of view can provide an arms-length perspective when all you're getting is in-your-face hysteria.
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zabo
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by zabo » Thu Aug 03, 2017 12:14 pm

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tommu
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by tommu » Fri Aug 04, 2017 3:09 pm

Take your pick from each side and ignore the extremes. You're able to read the UK press online, The Guardian and the Times will give you a soft left and right view from the outside. NPR is very good. They try to be objective as do the BBC. The Far right will scream that these are extreme left rags which really is not the case. If you want extreme left then go to morningstaronline.co.uk or something like http://www.alternet.org/ in the USA.

Take some time to look at the background and ideologies of some of the people who own the news source your reading - and of the people who criticize it. That will tell you a lot about how much you should trust it.

This is a fun chart: http://imgur.com/gallery/iPLkz

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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by Spezialist » Sun Aug 06, 2017 11:42 am

the typical human has its own self interest at heart, so until you decide to report on what you see everything will be biased.

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Amskeptic
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by Amskeptic » Sun Aug 06, 2017 7:33 pm

tommu wrote:
Fri Aug 04, 2017 3:09 pm
Take your pick from each side and ignore the extremes. You're able to read the UK press online, The Guardian and the Times will give you a soft left and right view from the outside. NPR is very good. They try to be objective as do the BBC. The Far right will scream that these are extreme left rags which really is not the case. If you want extreme left then go to morningstaronline.co.uk or something like http://www.alternet.org/ in the USA.

Take some time to look at the background and ideologies of some of the people who own the news source your reading - and of the people who criticize it. That will tell you a lot about how much you should trust it.

This is a fun chart: http://imgur.com/gallery/iPLkz

That is an interesting chart. Too bad Al Jazeera went belly up here in the US. They had gritty reporters.
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by zabo » Mon Aug 07, 2017 4:31 am

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JLT
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by JLT » Sat Aug 12, 2017 6:01 pm

I'd add the Guardian, a British paper that has an online presence to which you can subscribe. My wife does.

Also the New Yorker magazine. Great in-depth coverage of many stories ... if it takes them ten pages to get the full story out in a way that makes sense, that's what they'll use. And any public library worth its salt has a subscription, although I subscribe as a way of keeping them in business.

Bottom line: in news as in anything else, you get what you pay for. If you're not paying for it, somebody else is, and they're printing what they want you to know rather than what you need to know. That goes for local newspapers, too, if they're serious about reportage ... in my area, I have the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle, which routinely win awards for investigative reporting. And don't forget the failing New York Times, and any other source that the Trumpster considers "failing" ... that's his code word for "sources I don't want you to read, because they disagree with me."
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(sometimes towing a '65 Allstate single-wheel trailer)
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by Amskeptic » Tue Aug 15, 2017 10:33 am

Ah yes, the failing New York Times and the biased Washington Post which have seen their subscriptions rebound as of late.

It is touching to see blog posts that rail against their "liberal bias" when the entire world's news organizations are reporting pretty much the same news . . .
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Chloe - 70 bus . . . 217,593 miles
Naranja - 77 Westy . . . 142,970 miles
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Alexus - 91 Lexus LS400 . . . 96,675 miles

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JLT
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by JLT » Tue Aug 15, 2017 12:00 pm

Well, I've done a bit of thinking about this, and have come up with an essay on the subject which I'll be posting on my blog when I think it's done. In the meantime, here's a sneak preview. It's a bit long for a usual post, so I'll be glad to trim it down for the purposes of this forum if the admins desire:

Navigating the News Stream

I’ve been reading a book of essays that E. B. White wrote for the New Yorker magazine from 1926 to 1976. It’s a remarkable collection, not simply for the quality of its writing — Mr. White was one of the last century’s great literary stylists, whose writing largely epitomized the magazine’s flavor — but for the insights he had regarding the world he was living in, and for the world it was shaping up to be.

On September 11, 1948, he wrote about Presidential candidate Harry A. Wallace’s opinion of the press. "He keeps saying that you can’t learn the truth from the papers," White wrote. "We agree. You can’t learn the truth from the papers. You can, however, buy at any newsstand a ten-cent assortment of biased and unbiased facts and fancies and reports and opinions, and from them you are allowed to try to assemble something that is a reasonable facsimile of the truth. And that’s the way we like it, too."

Of course, the price of those papers nowadays will be more in the range of ten dollars than ten cents, and the number of daily newspapers has become vanishingly small, but we have sources of news from radio and television and the Internet that somewhat counterbalance that dearth. And they have the same range of bias. And the burden of assembling a reasonable facsimile of the truth still falls to us; as war is too important to be left to the generals, journalism is too important to be left to the pundits. (And I should add that in another article, White pointed out that "truth" should never be spelled with a capital "t.")

But the difference between his era and ours is that much of this news comes already filtered for us. For example, Facebook has identified me as of the liberal persuasion, and has tailored its feed to include mostly sources such as the Other 98%, Occupy Democrats, and the Resistance Report. (I should point out that I don’t subscribe to any of these services, but that doesn’t prevent them from popping up on my Facebook feed.) Unless a friend specifically shares a post from a right-wing site, I’ll never see it, and never know that there was a difference of opinion on the matter. Similarly, I doubt if my friend sees anything that doesn’t support his own conservative viewpoint unless I send it to him. He lives in a world of Fox News, Breitbart, Red State and InfoWars. Is it any surprise that his view of the world differs so much from mine?

Earlier that same year, White published a column in which he described what he considered a disturbing trend. He quoted an article that appeared in Editor and Publisher:

"San Francisco — Public opinion polls are scientific tools which should be used by newspapers to prevent editorial errors of judgment, Dr. Chilton Bush, head of the Division of Journalism at Stanford University, believes.
"‘A publisher is smart to take a poll before he gets his neck out too far,’ he said. ‘Polls provide a better idea of acceptance of newspaper policies.’"

Now I’m quoting Mr. White’s response: "We have read this statement half a dozen times, probably in the faint hope that Editor & Publisher might be misquoting Dr. Bush or that we had failed to understand him. But there it stands — a clear guide to the life of expediency, a simple formula for journalism by acceptance, a short essay on how to run a newspaper by saying only the words the public wants to hear said. It seems to us that Dr. Bush hands his students not a sword but a weather vane. Under such conditions, the fourth estate becomes a mere parody of the human intelligence, and had best be turned over to bright birds with split tongues or to monkeys who can make change."

It has taken close to seventy years, but we seem to be on the verge of the victory over journalism that White had envisioned. More than ever, we get our news from sources who do not wish to disturb our world-view. I’ll quote another writer, George Orwell, who said, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” To which I might add another quote whose source I cannot trace: "Journalism consists of telling people nor what they want to hear but what they need to hear."

So where should one go for news? For me, the best sources fall into three categories. First are those newspapers which have shown some degree of journalistic integrity, such as the New York Times or England’s Guardian. In my area, I have the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Chronicle, which routinely win awards for investigative reporting. Conservatives may dismiss them as "liberal" publications, which they probably deserve in some measure, because editors tend to be more liberal than their readership. But they print other viewpoints than those of their editorial staff, and invite comment on their articles.

The best thing about these sources is the diversity of their subject matter. My mother used to tell me that she made a point of reading the first two paragraphs of any news article in the newspaper, whether the subject interested her or not. (I presume that this did not include the sports pages.) She said that it gave her some insight into what other people consider important enough to report on. I can’t say that I’ve followed that regimen, but I do try to read every headline.

The second family of sources consists of magazines that do in-depth articles on current events. Of these, the New Yorker magazine is most valuable to me, because I trust their fact-checking and their ability to cover a story in ways that newspapers, television and radio cannot. If it takes them ten pages to get the full story out in a way that makes sense, that's what they'll use. (They once gave an entire issue to printing John Hersey’s book Hiroshima in full, rather than condensing or serializing it.) And any public library worth its salt has a subscription, although I subscribe as a way of keeping them in business. Mother Jones is another such magazine; while they have never tried to hide their progressive agenda, their stories are well researched and have stood up to the worst that their adversaries have thrown at them.

The third source is from independent, non-sponsored radio, which includes National Public Radio and Democracy Now. These agencies get almost all their funding from contributions of their member stations, which in turn depend on support from you and me and a few corporations willing to give them grants. They don’t look for commercial revenue to subsidize their news-gathering staff, which allows them to go where the story leads them.

Which brings me to a final point: in news as in anything else, you get what you pay for. If you're not paying for it, somebody else is, and they're telling what they want you to know, which all too often is not what you need to know. That goes for local newspapers, too, if they're serious about reportage. You can usually gauge their commitment to journalism by noting which ones have their own reporters, and which ones simply print press releases and articles off the news service feeds.

I see the information-screening process as a form of navigation. Pilots will tell you that a single beacon is next to useless, because you only get limited information from it: its direction from you, and possibly its distance from you. To get a more accurate fix on your location, you need at least two beacons, widely spaced apart. For maximum accuracy, you need three beacons, so that you can use triangulation to determine where you are. News sources are your beacons, and too few of them, spaced too closely together, will not get you where you need to go.

So read as much as you can, from as many different viewpoints as you can. Subscribe to newspapers and magazines, so they have the revenue to continue to report the news. Give websites like Wikipedia, Snopes, and Politifact your financial support as well as your patronage. Do the same for NPR and Democracy Now, because they can’t do their jobs without your money.

And here’s the hardest one: go out of your way to talk with people who disagree with you, and find out what your common interests and goals are. I remember folksinger/activist Pete Seeger’s response to somebody who asked him if he subscribed to the Daily Worker, the U.S. Communist Party’s paper. "Yes, I do," he said. "And I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. And what I would like to do someday is get the editors of both publications in the same room, and start a discussion."
-- JLT
Sacramento CA

Present bus: '71 Dormobile Westie "George"
(sometimes towing a '65 Allstate single-wheel trailer)
Former buses: '61 17-window Deluxe "Pink Bus"
'70 Frankenwestie "Blunder Bus"
'71 Frankenwestie "Thunder Bus"

TrollFromDownBelow
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by TrollFromDownBelow » Fri Aug 18, 2017 8:11 pm

JLT - Very insightful post, and I am glad you did it in its entirety. Have to admit, first time I saw it, I was way too tired to comprehend, so waited until I had the requisite time to absorb.

Thanks,
Mike
1976 VW Bus aka tripod
FI ...not leaky, and not so noisy...and she runs awesome!
hambone wrote: There are those out there with no other aim but to bunch panties. It's like arguing with a pretzel.
::troll2::

Jivermo
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by Jivermo » Sat Aug 19, 2017 5:19 pm

I have found the best source of unbiased news to be this forum.

TrollFromDownBelow
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by TrollFromDownBelow » Sat Aug 19, 2017 8:24 pm

Jivermo wrote:
Sat Aug 19, 2017 5:19 pm
I have found the best source of unbiased news to be this forum.
'
This may be a technicality, but this forum isn't necessarily a "news source", rather, you have folks on this forum who go out and read the source of news (companies and organizations that have people on the 'front line' and creating prose to report on what they see) and post enlightening articles from these sources.

Cheers,
Mike
1976 VW Bus aka tripod
FI ...not leaky, and not so noisy...and she runs awesome!
hambone wrote: There are those out there with no other aim but to bunch panties. It's like arguing with a pretzel.
::troll2::

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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by Jivermo » Sun Aug 20, 2017 6:16 am

This may be a technicality, but this forum isn't necessarily a "news source", rather, you have folks on this forum who go out and read the source of news (companies and organizations that have people on the 'front line' and creating prose to report on what they see) and post enlightening articles from these sources.
Yep. That's all I need. That, and Colin's musing on the meaning of life, proper torque values, and valve adjustment procedures.

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TrollFromDownBelow
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Re: best source of unbiased news...

Post by TrollFromDownBelow » Wed Aug 23, 2017 7:16 pm

The articles and insights are thought provoking, therefore would call this sight of enlightening news source...but probably not "unbiased". I would say that of the 50 or so regular posters, you have 40ish that lean to the left, 5-7 that are moderates (myself included) and the remainder could be called conservatives.

Cheers,
Mike
1976 VW Bus aka tripod
FI ...not leaky, and not so noisy...and she runs awesome!
hambone wrote: There are those out there with no other aim but to bunch panties. It's like arguing with a pretzel.
::troll2::

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