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posted by Fnord666 on Friday December 28 2018, @05:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-do-you-trust? dept.

For on-line news, what sites do you avoid and which ones do you seek out as being trustworthy?

Thanks to my position as an editor on SoylentNews, I've had the privilege of viewing story submissions which have referenced a veritable plethora of different sources. It has been a privilege to serve you these past few years. My goal has been to provide stories that cover a diversity of areas but always with an attempt to provide level-headed background. I strive to avoid shrill in-your-face!!!!elevnty! diatribes. To invoke a common mis-quotation "Just the facts, ma'am." Full confession: I'm not above posting an occasional funny or feel-good story, either.

Over time, I've come to learn that some sources are more reputable than others. News outlets are comprised of people who have their own biases; some try to remain objective whereas others use their position to push an agenda.

For example, I've learned here that RT is a mouthpiece for the Russian government (A modern-day Pravda, if you will).

The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), on the other hand, is funded primarily through a television license costing £147 per year per household. But, it has received a funding boost from government to expand its global reach.

Fox News has had complaints about its content and has had its share of controversies. But even some commonly-held beliefs about Fox News have proved exaggerated and not fully supported by the facts.

ScienceDaily, phys.org, CNET, Quora, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), ESA (European Space Agency), Spaceflight Now, weather.gov, and Hurricane Prediction Center are just some of the sites that I have found especially helpful.

So, I turn to the SoylentNews community:

  • What biases have you found with MSM (main-stream media)?
  • what 'news' sites do YOU avoid? Why?
  • where do YOU find trustworthy, unbiased, fact-supported news?

Bonus question: What would you think of a news story on SoylentNews whose only supporting link is CNN? Fox News? Breitbart?


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday December 28 2018, @05:40PM (10 children)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday December 28 2018, @05:40PM (#779393)

    What biases have you found with MSM (main-stream media)?

    There are tons of biases that all people purporting to be news outlets have, but from the big main-stream media in capitalist countries, the most important biases are:
    1. "Everything is basically fine. Any problems you may be experiencing right now are your own damn fault. People who negative stuff is happening to aren't like you, so you can sympathize with them but don't feel like their problems are your problems."
    2. "The government is generally right. There may be some scandals here and there, but nothing is seriously amiss. Especially on foreign policy, there's a general consensus that shall not be questioned. If there is a problem, it can be fixed by replacing the Democrats with Republicans or vice versa."
    3. "Any problems you have and are unable to fix on your own can be fixed by buying something. More news about this after these messages from our sponsors ..."

    Noam Chomsky's classic Manufacturing Consent is worth a read for more on this. These biases I just listed are much more important than any left or right bias you may detect.

    And no, this doesn't mean that the non-mainstream news sites aren't also biased as all get-out.

    What 'news' sites do YOU avoid? Why?

    Slashdot, of course!

    But more seriously, I'd probably avoid anything that's from The Daily Stormer, InfoWars, or HuffPo, because all of those organizations have a pattern of misrepresenting facts to suit their ideology. I'm sure there are other nutjobs out there worth ignoring, though, so don't make that the definitive list.

    More to the point, determining what is and isn't true isn't a matter of what site the story is hosted on. For example, there were completely false stories planted in the New York Times in 2001-3 when the Bush administration was trying to convince us that invading Iraq was a good idea. Fox News personalities are paid bonuses to say certain talking points as many times as they can during their time on air, and those talking points are determined by politics, not truth.

    Where do YOU find trustworthy, unbiased, fact-supported news?

    No single source has it. When you're considering running or believing a story, the right thing to do is go through the good old Baloney Detection Kit, which includes seeking out corroboration of the facts from as many diverse sources as possible. Ideally with organizations that have an ability to know first-hand: 5 local papers running the same AP story about something going on in Israel / Palestine aren't corroboration in the same way as the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and Al Jazeera all being in general agreement about what happened.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday December 28 2018, @07:07PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday December 28 2018, @07:07PM (#779427)

    Oh, and in case it's not clear what my answer to the bonus question is, there is no single source I would trust completely, regardless of whether it's CNN, Fox, Brietbart, Sinclair Broadcasting, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, or a random dude's blog.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Friday December 28 2018, @08:46PM (7 children)

    by donkeyhotay (2540) on Friday December 28 2018, @08:46PM (#779453)

    I think Thexalon's answers are pretty good.

    There is always a certain amount of bias in the news, but I think it's much worse now than in previous decades. The reason is probably due to a shift in how we are consuming news, which is driving how news is being paid for. It basically comes down to clicks. Infowars and Huffpo, to use two of your examples, are terrible news sources, but they are also very successful because they get people to click. And when people click, they see the messages that the advertisers are paying to be shown. Even the cachet of individual journalists (or should I write "journalists"?) goes up or down based on clicks. "Journalists" who get a lot of clicks get paid; those that don't can't make a living.

    Given such a click-driven environment, objectivity doesn't stand a chance.

    My personal strategy is to avoid news sources that are the obvious outliers and consume a variety of better quality sources from which I can derive my own picture of what is probably (hopefully) really happening. It's very wearying, but I don't know any other way to do it these days.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday December 28 2018, @09:35PM (5 children)

      by Thexalon (636) on Friday December 28 2018, @09:35PM (#779473)

      I think it's much worse now than in previous decades.

      I'm not sure when this halcyon era is supposed to have occurred: For instance, in 1991 it was basically journalistic suicide to suggest that maybe the war in the Persian Gulf wasn't a good idea, and a few decades before that journalists daring to report on anti-Vietnam War protests got their heads bashed in by cops. Read up on William Randoph Hearst and yellow journalism if you want to know what things were like around 1900. And before that, there was rarely much pretense of objectivity. Clickbait is bad, but it's no different from the sensationalist headlines of yore.

      Some things that maybe made a difference on this front, although for good or for ill can be debated:
      - The "Fairness Doctrine" that was part of FCC rules from 1949 to 1987, that required that radio and TV broadcasters had to provide chances for multiple sides of an issue to be heard, and to refrain from editorializing on the air during what were supposedly news broadcasts.
      - A related FCC requirement that TV networks in particular had to operate their newsroom as a public service and typically at a loss in return for their broadcast license, rather than as a for-profit operation. This went away with the advent of cable news networks like Fox News and MSNBC.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:49AM (3 children)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:49AM (#779538) Journal

        Thank you for those reminders.

        Perfectly true that there was no golden age, that ended one, two, or six decades ago. I try to remind people of that myself.

        But, there were qualities to the news that are missing today. The "public service" bit probably has a lot to do with those changed qualities. And, the fairness doctrine, although, it still left an echo chamber for the news services to operate in. It's just that the echo chamber was much different than it is today.

        And, perhaps, things really are better in some ways today. When I was a youth, whatever you heard from ABC, NBC, and CBS was Gospel, with that capital "G". Essentially, they all told the same story, in that Government is Good, and you can Trust Washington.

        With or without conspiracy theories, I think we all know today that you don't just trust Washington.

        It's not all good though. Depending on your favorite channel(s), most Americans seem to still know that they can Trust the Party.

        If/when we, as a people, wake up, and reject those two parties, maybe we'll get real news from the MSM. Or not. Maybe it's time to replace all of the major news sources with something better. At one point in time, I though CNN was that "something better". Alas, CNN today is eaten up with the same cancer that all the rest of CNN suffers with.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:10PM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:10PM (#779739)

          Wake up? Runaway has lost what little mind that he had! Early onset Faux News?

          • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:27PM (1 child)

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 29 2018, @05:27PM (#779747) Journal

            Are you drooling, or do you need to wipe your nose?

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @11:56PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @11:56PM (#779852)

              Shut up, Runaway! You're ruining SoylentNews again! I hear banjo music. Strange.

      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday December 29 2018, @02:14AM

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 29 2018, @02:14AM (#779563) Homepage Journal

        in 1991 it was basically journalistic suicide to suggest that maybe the war in the Persian Gulf wasn't a good idea, and a few decades before that journalists daring to report on anti-Vietnam War protests got their heads bashed in by cops.

        A foreign perspective really demonstrates the weight of the political hand on news, even in allegedly free-speech areas.. Here in Canada, journalists did make negative reports on the Persian Gulf war and the Vietnam war without getting their heads bashed in.

        I wonder what Canadian news we weren't being told.

        -- hendrik

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:07AM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 29 2018, @12:07AM (#779521) Journal

      It's not just a shift in how news is paid for...unless you interpret that pretty widely. A large part of the problem is an increased concentration of ownership...the editor may not be "controlled", but he generally knows what those who hired him want said. Another element is the increased focus on news that can't be checked locally. Local papers used to focus on local news, but since being bought up by chains, the same story will run word for word the same on the entire chain of papers. That's not local news. It usually isn't even news from the same city, and often not news from the same state. It's true I don't have a great deal of interest in the scores of the local high school basketball team...but at least that news was usually reliable, and it could be (and was) checked by those with first hand knowledge.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 1) by mmarujo on Wednesday January 02 2019, @11:36AM

    by mmarujo (347) on Wednesday January 02 2019, @11:36AM (#780974)

    Easy rule of thumb to validate or disprove this:

    * How long is the "news segment"? Is it predetermined or is it long enough to tell the news?
    * How many times do you wonder "How is this news?" ?

    I consider these to be simple clues that the news segment is not about news but the business of selling news. Nowhere have I seen something like "That's all for today, the XYZ segment is shorter today because today nothing major happened."