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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?
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Friday December 28 2018, @08:46PM (7 children)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Are you drooling, or do you need to wipe your nose?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 29 2018, @11:56PM
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
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
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.
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