Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Do You Choose a News Source? (csmonitor.com)
Obfiscator writes: Journalism has long had potential to change the world. The latest elections in the United States demonstrated new dimensions of this, with the rise of "fake news" and "echo chambers," as well as a president who has few reservations in expressing his thoughts of the media. The Christian Science Monitor has been a favorite news site of mine for years, due to their objective and balanced reporting, as well as their tendency to avoid "breaking news" and provide detailed analysis a few days later. Very few stories are going to impact my world to the point where waiting a couple days to read about them will make a difference. Despite the name, the vast majority of articles have no religious context (they address this in their FAQ). CSM has recently switched to be completely behind a paywall, as well. In their words, "We hope the Monitor Daily addresses both those trends. It is pushed to where our readers are and offers this pact: We will deliver our distinctive view of the world and you support financially our ability to produce that news." Is this the next trend: moving away from advertising revenues? Will this create more balanced journalism, as there is no need to attract clicks? Or will it deepen "echo chambers?" How do Slashdotters choose their news sites?
My choice basically boils down to the stuff I reflexively type in mindlessly in temporary semi-subconscious distraction, as I unthinkingly consume one of a very limited number of news site that grabbed my mind share at one point. After that it's turtles all the way down, as I keep typing in the same urls like a laboratory crack monkey seeking its next hit from the lever. These patterns last years or decades.
Nice choices. :)
To answer TFA's question:
I don't, I come here to talk about last week's news
...watching MSNBC & Al Jazeera and splitting the difference.
That's half facetious, but the reality is that if you get all your news from a single source, you're guaranteed to get a biased view of reality, no matter what the source. The best thing you can do is to get information from as many different sources as possible, and when there are differences, do a little digging through meta-analysis sites to try to figure out where the truth lies.
If you don't have time to do that, your only choice is to accept that you will always be at least to some degree uninformed, hope that it doesn't matter, and don't worry about it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Then I watch Fox News because Jesus hates Muslims too.
In order to be informed one must digest many news sources- even when their bias is not your bias. Even foreign sources.
Then... you ruminate. Let the information sink in. And make the best call you can about what is true.
At the moment much of journalism has lost it's value. But in my opinion, the bright spots are easy to spot when you ignore your own ideology and start matching facts against stories.
Just make sure you have a real understanding about what a "fact" actually is.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Just don't necessarily believe it.
Especially if there's some sort of emotional resonance or if it seems especially convenient to someone's worldview.
Daily Mail seems OK. And factual financial news is rarely biased to the point of uselessness. Tech news can be ok.
Also, read stories about what happened, not stories about what might happen, or stories about what it might mean to someone, or stories about someone reacting to what happened. Facts, not "meaning".
And remember the news isn't about you.
use the following phrases in story titles and subtitles: ...number [x] will leave you.. ...you've been waiting for ...you should...
1. Here's what you need to know about...
2. Everything you need to know about...
3.
4. This is how...
5. The science behind...
6.
7.
8. [x] (silences|schools) [y] with one [z]
If you are looking for just one metric, a good one is to avoid corporate or state-sponsored news. God knows there will be a lot of dross still but it won't be supported by a huge propaganda machine that can manufacture consent. The Christian Science Monitor has always had a unique non-profit model (which may not be workable anymore but has resulted in some excellent reportage for a long time) and similarly, so does ProPublica.
Slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters!
Read a wide variety of news. Reuters feed, AP feed, news channel sites, newspaper sites. Compare them to each other, and research the claims.
The truth is not Fox, or CNN, or The Times. It is somewhere in the middle of the bunch. And parts of it are scattered all over.
I generally rely on a mix of NPR, CNN & NY Times, but I actually go to Fox just to see their slant on the news. It can be pretty amazing... headline stories on the other sources literally don't exist on Fox. I read an interesting article that said that Fox had perfected altering the news cycle:
1) bad story comes out on trump
2) Fox instantly headlines some conspiracy theory (like about the murdered Clinton aide) to divert attention, and buries the real story.
3) To close the loop, Fox claims that the bad news about Trump is the "fake news" that's being used to divert attention from the "real story" that was hatched on some conspiracy website.
If they have a slant it isn't really greased by the same powers here.
As long as you don't read the editoral section or even one of the comments, the WSJ has great news. In part it's because they try to provide analysis. What does this news mean to you. The washington post is doing something similar but they are a lot more hyperventilating than the WSJ.
But for the love of god do not read the comments section. It will make you weep for humanity. Nothing but kneejerks, tards, and flambait. And the editorial section is pretty hilarious because they appear to have built a firewall between they editorail commentary and the news analaysis such that very often their news analysis flatly rejects the basis of their own editorials. Fairly rabid editorials.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Oh, come on, really?
There is only ONE authoritative source of well-researched, verified, informative, objective news reporting and that is The Daily Mail!
Fantastic, hard-hitting news without all the fakery that drives so many click-bait sites these days
</sarc>
I season my variety of domestic news sources, which includes newspapers, television, radio, and the internet, with reporting from outside of the United States. The BBC is the first, and probably best, source that comes to mind, but Australia and India also provide English resources for news not biased by American ideology.
I'm conservative, but I like to read VARIOUS sites. I read overseas, domestic, conservative, liberal then, form my own opinion, based on my own belief.
I just don't care and am one of the most well adjusted people I know. Weird maybe, but not neurotic or stressed.
Watching "news" 18 hours a day does not contribute to this. To everybody else, enjoy your medicated sanity.
I ask myself, "Does this news source give all viewpoints, including the ones I disagree with, including the unpopular ones?" I judge them first by the subjects that I'm most familiar with myself (primarily medicine and biology). Classroom example: Does a story about abortion give both (or all) sides? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02...
In my freshman year of college, even the engineering majors had to take a humanities course. The most valuable book they gave me was John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. http://www.bartleby.com/130/2.... Mill summarized it himself:
So I look for a news source that gives me as many ideas as possible, so I can evaluate them myself. A special case is the journalistic rule: Whenever you attack someone, you have an obligation to give him a chance to respond. I worked as a journalist myself, and any journalist can tell you that when you get the other side, it often turns the whole story around.
The one newspaper that did the best job (more than the New York Times) was the Wall Street Journal. For example, they did a story on a welfare work program in California, and interviewed everyone from the governor down to the welfare recipients. (It seemed clear to me that the program wasn't working, but you could come to your own conclusions.) Some of their best reporters were socialists. Their page 1 editor was gay, contracted AIDS, wrote about his treatement with AZT, and got a Pulitzer Prize for it. http://www.pulitzer.org/winner... They wrote about the successes and failures of the capitalist system. The WSJ made their reputation when GM told them to kill a story, threatened to cancel all their advertising if they didn't, and the WSJ told them to fuck off.
But best of all, they gave me ideas every morning that I disagreed with, and I had to figure out whether I was really right.
Then Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ and destroyed the best newspaper in the world, by placing right-wing political commissars over the editing process and censoring liberal ideas. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12... .
So it's back to the New York Times, even though they have an annoying habit of pandering to their advertisers and to the neo-liberal establishment. (I noticed this when I was following auto safety engineering, and the NYT basically followed the auto industry line that seat belts and air bags were too expensive. The auto industry is in the top 2 or 3 newspaper advertisers.)
After that, the best news sources that I read are in the professional journals. Science magazine actually does get all sides. I also read the New England
People on the left just love to rain crap all over Drudge Report yet everyone seems to ignore the reality that they are literally nothing more than a news aggregator. It just highlight news aimed at people with a right wing bias.
Most of the comments so far are opinions on how to find or interpret news. Answering the question is more to the point. I listen to the NPR hourly news summary for breaking news, otherwise it's a scan of google news for topics of interest, then off to the specific interest sites (lots of science for me) that the submitter didn't really mean.
Google news just collects stuff, then you can choose which article to read about the given subject. Comparing a few sources is easy, and really highlights the biased stance of each publication.
Being well informed is now a matter of taking the time to slog through the simplified or biased sources with a seriously skeptical eye. As long as the local grocery store is open and I have enough money to shop there, I'm happy to watch it all go by. I absolutely participate in the things I feel passionate about, but Thank $DEITY that most of the stuff in the news is somewhere over there and not in my face.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Despite the name they're fairly objective and have won numerous Pulitzer prizes for reporting as well as a Peabody award. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
You can't really blame the companies either. Real journalism requires an investment of both time and money that sensationalist bullshit doesn't, and on top of that important stories aren't always amenable to clickbaity titles.
That means real journalism both costs more and generates less (advertising) revenue. Alternative sources have to be found if they intend to keep operating while retaining some modicum of journalistic integrity.
I mean in a sense you can blame the companies for not changing their business model to "unverified partisan rants" like Breitbart, but that doesn't really help us get real news and while it may be financially good for any particular news outlet, it would be a significant detriment to the world as a whole and really shouldn't be something we encourage.
The only other option is to convince people to be critical of what they read/hear/see but that has continually proven itself an impossible task. Most people are happy living in their comfort zone and really don't want to leave, especially if it takes extra effort to do so.
Unfortunately this puts us in a worst-of-both-worlds situation: Doing the best thing journalistically is somewhat mutually exclusive with doing the best thing financially.
I don't know if paywalling is the solution to this dilemma or not. I suspect it won't be, if for no other reason than because most people won't want to (or more likely just can't afford to) subscribe to more than one or two news services and end up in just a different kind of bubble. But at least they're trying to do something beyond just selling out and, at least for a little longer, the world can retain a few outlets that attempt to peddle real (and verified) news rather than just partisan rants.
Yea, they do have a tendency to ignore the mostly left slanted news. A new business model for them would be for them to have a Drudge Right and a Drudge Left. Somewhere in between should be the answer everyone is looking to find.
I have no problems with paying for a news source. I'ld rather pay myself than having some advertiser pay it for me.
But there is one point I am no longer willing to compromise: any news source I pay for must offer me a full text RSS feed.
I read about 400 news items per day. With several sources I get a decent balancing. But this is only possible if I get full text RSS feeds. Otherwise the workflow kills me.
Last week's news hasn't got here yet.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Last week's news didn't show up this week. It'll get here on Sunday.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
You're only laughing at Breitbart because your corporate master told you to.
"Laughing at" is inaccurate. "Disgusted by" is more accurate. They've been involved in several of the big conspiracy theories including the Birthers & Pizzagate. I don't see that kind of behavior from CNN. Buzzfeed maybe. Here are some of their more notable headlines.
If you're only paying attention to one particular narrative, then you're a chump. Doesn't matter what that narrative is. There is really no way to choose "A" news source. You have to pick several with opposing narratives.
I agree with that, but you need credible news sources. Breitbart exists at the very fringe of being considered "news".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
... and then again on Thursday.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."