I like to listen to NPR's up first. They don't have too much time to editorialized. I'll then go to AP or Reuters if I want to follow up on something.
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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I've had great experiences with reading socialist news sites. They tend not to care about 'the spectacle' and don't like ads. Although you still have to avoid the ones like WSWS who just use it as a platform to call other socialists 'pseudo-left'.
Side note: There's a great famous analysis of the US media in the book Manufacturing Consent. You can find a PDF online, but at the very very very least you should read the Wikipedia summary. It explains the reasons why media organisations almost inevitably have some of these biases and bullshits.
WSWS?
"World Socialist Web Site", the paper of the Socialist Equality Party (who, in my personal experience, are toxic idealists who will counterprotest pickets and any union action whatsoever)
Generally just use multiple sources, I used Ground News for quite a while.
Every news outlet will have their biases, that is completely normal everyone has biases, even when you have multiple people reviewing the content, only a fraud will tell you they're completely unbiased. So just seek multiple sources, preferably from also multiple countries and languages when applicable.
I check the economist if i want to check wild rumors. The humor is great and subtle. It is on the conservative side thought.
Before cable news and before there was such an appetite for political news, real news sources were very diverse. Every newspaper had a sports section and an entertainment section. Also opinion was in the opinion or op-ed section. Nowadays I'm more leary of news sources that are strictly political news. Everyone has a Washington DC correspondent. Lots of news sites will buy all of their news outside of DC from a wire service or even sometimes their story is "reporting" what another agency is reporting. Maybe I'm just old and set in my ways but I prefer the traditional well rounded sources. Others just seem cheap and have an agenda
everyone has and always had an agenda.
Aside from that, generally I can agree, the commodification of news and profit-seeking, as often is the case, have ruined everything.
Every news agency will have an inherent bias. There is no such thing as purely objective news without a perspective. However, you can learn to identify the biases, cross reference news with different sources, especially ones from different countries to see other perspectives, and then think about the topics yourself to get a deeper understanding.
This is the way. It's a ton off work and often, you have to be willing to be wrong about what you thought you knew going into a subject. Approaching news from multiple perspectives reveals your own biases too.
The perfect news source for me would be a single, trustworthy aggregator that showed me several perspectives on every story, all in the same place. That doesn't exist though.
there are some attempts like ground.news but I agree they leave a lot to be desired and tend to completely ignore non western sources
It became really difficult after billionaires bought up much of the smaller/stagnant media companies and turned them into "cut research and investigation departments, copy the NYT, and push ~~entertainment~~ opinion articles"
My rule of thumb unfortunately has become: is it a large corporation? Then it can go fuck itself. As others have said AP is good too
AlJazeera
I recommend news agencies* like Reuters, AP, and AFP. If you want to just get pure news.
*News agencies are companies that primarily sell news to other companies like CNN.
Bloomberg news tends to only have the kind of news youβre referring to.
I like allsides.com
All media are biased. Some are open about their bias (communist media) and some are not (Wikipedia says it's "neutral" but there's a catch). Western media are all very polular and one-sided so I recommend reading english.news.cn.
mintpressnews, the grayzone
1440 is what I use. It's literally bare-bones news articles devoid of any opinion, just facts. They cover both US and international news, and have small culture and sports blips that aren't click-baity. And it's emailed to you every day. :)
I've not read 1440 at all, so this may or may not apply, but I'd offer a word of caution to any news that purports to be "just facts". You can absolutely promote an agenda with only facts by choosing which facts to publish (and what stories to even cover). It's sometimes better to aim to get news from sources that are just very transparent about their biases instead of claiming they don't have any.
I don't think it's better to go for highly biased news at all, I don't care what the reporter thinks or feels about the facts, I just want them. The overtly biased news outlets are filled to the brim with opinion. If there are facts a story is leaving out, it will eventually get to me through the absolute garbage microphone that is social media, and I can check out the sources from there.
All news has a bias, some news just doesn't tell you what their bias is. I'm not advocating for intentionally aiming for biased news, I'm advocating for knowing what the bias of the author/editor of the story is, so that when you read it, you know what conclusion they might be trying to lead you to. Even if a journalist tries their best to be impartial, that's not possible, and like I said, it's very easy to tell a one sided story with exclusively facts.
DW gets my vote
I like Axios because it's short form but has extended versions of I find it interesting enough to learn more.
Sounds like you might just want the news without fluff.
I use AllSides as my main news source for federal news. Give them a try. The writing is succinct and gets straight to the point.
They give you news of the day in small chunks separated by topic. Each topic has a quick context, run down of what's happening, and (my favorite) how the left right and center outlets are all covering it.
They also have an RSS feed (provided by Open RSS because they dont serve their own feeds. https://openrss.org/allsides.com
News is a service that determines whatβs newsworthy and summarizes it. You canβt do that without bias at some level.
I really wish there was a news source with coverage weighted by humanitarian impact.
That might actually be too far in the other direction for what you're thinking of, though. Most political news wouldn't be there, just because it's hard to draw a direct line objectively to the impact it has. Many sites provide categories and filters, so maybe just using those more would be a start.
I would check out Semafor as well
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