I'm not in the habit of checking in on individual media outlets, but when I see content from WSJ, Bloomberg, or The Information on any of the above aggregators, I generally like what I see.
Thanks for this - that's exactly what I was hoping to find when I clicked into this.
While I didn't find a whole lot of the content I had intended, I think what I did find was interesting, none-the-less. The general opinion here seems to be "news sources suck[0]", especially if it has anything to do with politics/politics-masquerading-as-economics[1]. And community-driven sites tend to become dominated by the fringe of one political persuasion or another. HN does a good job, here, though a look at "new" yields a few headlines who's content can be summarized as "Your politician iz teh satan11", they rarely bubble up, and the ones that do -- even the ones that (headline-wise) I'd probably never click through in another context, I end up appreciating more often than not.
[1] Replace "economics" with anything else. HN's policy against political-related posts aside, I think this community tends toward skepticism and a lot of political is facts/truth twisted to fit an agenda/bias (intentional or not).
I subscribed to a couple of newsletters to stay up to date. The TLDR I read on a daily basis. JavaScript Weekly is also very good if you're interested int webdev.
Is it sad to admit to BBC satirical news programmes. This generally works - they cover the "biggest" stories of the week, and if it strikes a chord I can go google for more.
However it failed spectacularly a few years back - A political enemy of the UK prime Minister David Cameron had written a book claiming Cameron had put his (Cameron's) penis into the mouth of a dead pig for a university prank. This had been banned from being repeated in UK media but twitter and non-english sources were full. So satirical programs were simply full of jokes about pigs, oink oink noises and more. They got hilarious reactions from those in the know but I simply had no idea why - it was weeks before the explanation broke somehow
> Is it sad to admit to BBC satirical news programmes
I for years got all of my main news from HIGNFY, Mock the Week and Private Eye. I got most of the nuance, without the outrage. Shame we don't have anything in the UK like The Daily Show, otherwise I probably wouldn't frequent any news sources other than those that skewer it all.
The BBC has a wide range of podcasts (available internationally), including ones about geopolitics and science.
Due to the nature of the medium and the BBC's generally more serious and composed disposition these podcasts tend to be about actually relevant information rather than the outrage-inducing, largely irrelevant rubbish commonly fed by "Now ... this" media.
I'd advise steering clear of anything related to UK politics published by the BBC.
There's been a clear pro-right trend for a number of years evident most clearly during the most recent election and Scotland's independence referendum of 2014.
What was appalling about its coverage? Any sources or evidence? From what I understand they go to great lengths to remain as impartial as possible so curious what it is in particular you are referring to?
BBC's coverage (and that of other media) of Corbyn has been overwhelmingly negative ever since he announced he is running for Labour leadership.
Having said that, I think what's more interesting is the BBC's accidental editing of his main opponent in the recent election. That is, the first time they "accidentally" aired 2016 footage, and the second time they "accidentally" edited out the audience laughing at Boris Johnson after he was asked a question.
On both occasions the BBC apologised but I'm not sure it mattered. Obviously this does highlight that since the BBC is willing to do this, how many other times have they done this that hasn't been noticed?
The official BBC line is that these are "mistakes", although they all seem to err in one direction and there is no investigation or plan to reduce the mistakes in the future.
> Subjecting everyone except Johnson to interview by Andrew Neil
The BBC doesn’t have the power to subject people to interview by force. If he declines an interview which he is not obligated to give what should they have done?
(a) not announce "interviewing all the leaders" until all the leaders were confirmed. This could be a competence rather than a bias issue; wasn't it Fyre Festival who were announcing acts who they hadn't booked to perform?
(b) empty-chair him
(c) given that Gove and Stanley Johnson (who has no formal position in the party, he's just Johnson's father and now a minor celebrity) turned up to protest outside, they should have been challenged instead
(also, "someone who already edits a partisan political magazine" should be disqualified from senior BBC positions if you're pretending to be impartial)
I am not in the UK Conservative Party but I actually know a few people who are and I hear enough of what going on in the party. I don't particularly like the conservative party however I signed up for account because of egregiously wrong you are.
a) Various leaders agreed to go on a show. Boris Johnson doesn't have to go on the BBC and the BBC can interview who they wish. Andrew Neil likes to make fools of people on his show. He has done it to many politicians of all colours. It is really just a higher brow version of "Ben Shapiro defeats Liberals with facts and logic". Jeremy Corbyn was stupid enough to go on there and get himself shafted by Neil.
b and c) Gove and Stanley Johnson was sent by their party to the debate. Channel 4 (which is mostly publicly funded which most people don't know) did the whole ice sculpture as a stunt. They already bought the sculpture. The
As for the BBC having a "right wing bias". Nothing can be further from the truth. You can go on the website yourself and there are thousands of stories talking about typically left wing talking points.
I am actually building daily news site analysis tool by cobbling together some sources. I am using some fairly simple word analysis techniques (most of the effort is scraping the data from these sites and deciding what constitutes a real news story) and most of the language on the BBC and the Guardian are similar. I suspect that most of them just copy and paste stories tbh.
> I am using some fairly simple word analysis techniques (most of the effort is scraping the data from these sites and deciding what constitutes a real news story) and most of the language on the BBC and the Guardian are similar. I suspect that most of them just copy and paste stories tbh.
There is a more serious underlying problem you've spotted, which is "jounalism as stenography". Lots of people can put out press releases, which then really do get copy-pasted into articles. Same with "wire copy" sourced from AP or Reuters. This can be abused by bad actors to get obvious or difficult-to-refute falsehoods into the public memetic consciousness by repeating them.
> This can be abused by bad actors to get obvious or difficult-to-refute falsehoods into the public memetic consciousness by repeating them.
This is exactly why I started the project also I know there are hit pieces that are coordinated between the news-sites. I wonder how much other news that is reported is also coordinated reporting. However I have no direct proof of this and I cannot start from trying to prove something that I suspect. First I need to collect and analyse data fairly.
So far I've just used newspaper to do the hard work of scraping for me (https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper) some basic filtering techniques e.g. I discard everything that has a question mark at the end of it (Betteridge's law of headlines and an MySQL to store articles etc. Then I run the second script to do some basic string analysis. I am going to be building a small web app to display the results.
So far it is early days (It about 4 or 5 python files and a config file) and I have got two other projects I am working on that probably need completing first.
The right wing in the UK is usually the group most critical of the BBC (AKA "Brussels Broadcasting Corporation").
I would agree that the coverage during the Scottish referendum in 2014 was biased but I think that this is because the BBC is naturally biased towards the status-quo.
Any organisation that can produce The Thick of It being critical of politicians and W1A about its own antics can't be all bad....
In the post-trump era, right wing complaints against an organisation aren't necessarily a sign that that organisation is doing a good thing. Complaints from the factions in power in the UK at the moment are usually just a sign that their actions 'arent right enough' rather than not being right wing full stop.
Also, the BBC News wing has separate management, some of whom were appointed during Cameron's time in office. So the drama and comedy produced by the BBC can be independent of its news editing.
Complaints are, like any "flagging" system, being weaponized to move the Overton window. There's plenty of people willing to write in and complain any time the BBC says that global warming is happening, that shouldn't be taken as a need to "correct" that.
> I think that this is because the BBC is naturally biased towards the status-quo.
It's worth noting that the linked article does offer selection bias as an explanation – suggesting that conservative supporters were more likely to write letters, supporters of other parties less likely to.
Number of complaints seems a pretty poor measure of bias, but it is one that is often used to reinforce the idea of the BBC's impartiality.
Well, as someone who doesn't support any of the UK major national parties I'd say that the BBC was fairly good at making pretty much all of them look equally unappealing!
Fox News Headline: "Trump Cuts Aid to 3 Mexican Countries"
Issue: There is only one "Mexican Country" -- Mexico.
Regardless of political leaning, there is an issue with news like this.
I'm right leaning on some issues and left leaning on other issues. If you want right-leaning news, The Wall Street Journal is a far better source for right leaning news. I used to subscribe to the WSJ. Now I subscribe to the Financial Times which conveniently side-steps most US politics alltogether.
That was funny, but from the page you linked to it seems that was a bungled caption onscreen for a few seconds, hardly a "Fox News Headline" or "news".
> ...from the right than the left this year about the BBC?
You do realize that the single claim that you're citing as evidence for the BBC being biased towards the right is from a publisher that is left-leaning?
That's like asking Trump if CNN is "fake news" and citing his only opinion as evidence that CNN is biased against him which is hardly credible.
This just doesn’t seem to add up to me. You think that the BBC, based in London, the absolute epitome of the middle-class metropolitan liberal media Oxbridge elite, founded on a socialist principle of media provided by the state, an organisation that helped to pioneer left-wing satire, home of the News Quiz, a broadcaster that commissions programmes for Mark Steel, Marcus Brigstocke, the late Jeremy Hardy, is actually right-wing?
That's a trend reflected in voting patterns. What is the BBC supposed to do, ignore the fact that a massive number of voters rejected the Labour Party's platform, fail to note that Labour had their most dismal outing since 1935 while losing seats for the first time in many places in the north of England, and fail to comment that the UK Left is a dumpster fire and a hotbed of anti-Semitism?
If you are to be looking at new sources from the BBC, just stick to BBC World News. At its best, I find that the quality of the online sections and articles from the BBC are beyond woeful and extremely cringe-worthy everytime I dare to visit and read from the site or watch their news channel.
You'd expect that having the privilege of a royal charter they have a duty to be fair, impartial and balanced. But as shown in recent events and previous scandals, they are becoming a questionable source and still can't help giving coverage towards Twitter spats that isn't worth paying a TV license for.
The BBC also has a useful smartphone app. Each day it offers just a few items related to the US; can scan through them in a couple of minutes; seem free of any American left/right tilt.
- I skim/read a national newspaper every day in the morning for around 10-30m - https://www.TheHindu.com (no this one's not religious at all - quite the opposite :D).
- BBC news (I try to listen to the daily podcast in the evening). I've a radio too.
The intercept is by far the best news outlet. Most of their staff is incredible except a few pseudo journalists like Mehdi who are riding the anti-Trump train.
Even thought I'm kinda "ideologically aligned" with Página 12, I wouldn't consider it unbiased when it comes to country politics (quite the contrary, up to the point of not reporting news in some cases) from Argentina (As it is clearly aligned with the "peronist" movement). There are 2 newspaper that from my point of view do a better job of presenting news in a un-biased way.
One is www.ambito.com (That it originates in a financial newspaper, but their politics reporting is very good).
It's as close as can possibly be to unbiased, only lists significant events, and it covers world news rather than only focusing on America.
My secondary sources are reddit's /r/OutOfTheLoop, and the chyrons I see whenever I happen to walk by a TV that is playing the news (I learned of the Trump impeachment this way). If something doesn't come up in one of these three sources, it's probably not important enough to be worth the stress/anxiety that following the issue would cause.
why leaving Twitter? i just joined months ago after ignoring it for years, but yeah most of the content is just time waster besides local police, firemen and transport authority
Love how people downvote RT but upvote BBC. Take any media outlet with a big grain of salt. Al Jazeera is also a good news source, when you are intelligent enough to question motives.
People are not quite objective around HN when it comes to political stuff. That's fine, the technical stuff is still good.
> Take any media outlet with a big grain of salt
True. That's why you can't trust a person who gets his/her info only from BBC and NYT anymore than you can trust an engineer who doesn't know Lisp.
I'm also reading The Guardian, it has some nice opinion pieces, but when Australia is on fire the news is how some tourists saved some koalas and it's all well. When the Amazon burns, that's another story.
Sorry, but you're comparing rotten apples and oranges. When RT criticizes Putin the way the Times criticizes Trump or BBC criticizes Johnson, lmk. Actually, I already know when that will happen - after Putin is out of office and the new boss wants to discredit him.
How on earth can anyone present fox news as a serious news site? It's the living incarnation of for-profit shock journalism. It doesn't even pretend to have actual content. (I'd be just as irritated if someone said comedy central... Which is probably slightly more accurate, but still utterly idiotic)
"Popular" - lol, chinese state media is an order of magnitude more popular, do you think it's an order of magnitude more trustworthy?
I personally read the economist, ny times, and wsj for short-cycle online content. I listen to npr in the car, and then... I don't know, read constantly? Everything? Tech blogs? trade journals? History books? Literature? Religious shit? I struggle to keep up with the world in a meaningful way. Don't you?
Fox anything drowns itself in the vulgar idiocy of certitude. I can imagine no lesser epistemological sin in 2020.
Read and listen to get data, not to absorb obvious horseshit
Amen! Yes, just more one-sided views from the right/left paradigm. Clearly, not a news source intellectuals such as you and I would follow. Foxnews isn't even funded by the government like NYT and NPR, so how exactly can they claim to be trustworthly or unbiased?
I'm living with my parents currently. Their Alexa recommended the following news site, which is quite informative. I'm on the go a lot, looking for a job. Fortunately, my hybrid has a Bluetooth connection to my iPhone which enables me to listen while driving. I'm able to catch the latest headlines each day. It's one of the best-unbiased sources out there. I encourage you to check it out. Best wishes!
I try to avoid it. It's too much of a time sink and there's almost zero pieces of actionable information.
I know it's offensive to claim it's merely entertainment but in concrete terms there's no material difference resulting from tuning into daily banter that's any different than watching some serial drama on television.
I agree with you. I get an email USA news summary from The Guardian in the morning and a few minutes looking at that is suffices. I like democracynow.org also but only give that a good read a few times a month.
When a US politician does something I find offensive, I do take a few minutes to check to see if they are running for re-election in which case I try to donate $5 to their opponent. Otherwise, I am happy being “apathetic” to politics.
EDIT: I volunteer one day a week at my local food bank, and that helps tie me into local events and what is happening in town. Local news is the most important news to me since I have virtually no effect on the world outside of my local community.
This is my point of view as well. Even (especially?) for things like politics. I might read a quick summary about whatever the current big issues are every few weeks and around elections, but that's it.
Issues that may affect me (which are more local in nature) will naturally come up in conversation, so I don't think I'm really missing out on anything. I'm not in a position where I can change anything, so why bother wasting my attention on these things?
Assuming you have at least minimal social interaction, if anything actually important happens, somebody will tell you. So there's really no reason to pay attention to news at all. It's pure entertainment and time wasting.
You don’t have to follow news to make good political decisions. If people read philosophy as the same rates they follow fake political drama, we’ll be in a better place.
Democracy is achieved through active participation in building and maintaining institutions exercising power, not in passively consuming broadcasted editorial content.
It's depressing because consuming content in isolation doesn't materially affect anything. You can't watch your way to political action. It's empty and everyone knows it.
Donate money to causes you care about, attend meetings, help organize things, exercise power.
We don't have a democracy where you need to stay up to date with events, if this were Switzerland you'd have a point, but in most countries you only need to get the summary once every 4 years. I'd even argue that people will make better decisions if completely stepped away from everything and got some perspective before the election instead of constantly being emotionally involved all the time.
> there's almost zero pieces of actionable information.
I don't agree with this. The news is filled with actionable information. If nothing more than constant reporting of problems, many of which could be solved with new businesses - there is value in knowing about that if only to be better positioned to start businesses.
The world is full of people in pain, and often the news reports on that. That is actionable information. Other people's pain is not your entertainment. It is actionable information about how to help improve the world and reduce suffering.
Also, the news and happenings of the world do affect you every day even if you don't know it or notice it.
"You may not care about politics, but politics cares about you"
> The world is full of people in pain, and often the news reports on that. That is actionable information. Other people's pain is not your entertainment. It is actionable information about how to help improve the world and reduce suffering.
There is far, far more of this than is actionable, and most of it isn't really actionable from this distance. You end up with "white saviour" disease.
The news is also full of my fellow voters saying that those in pain are lying, or that we should inflict more pain on them as a matter of policy. Those are somewhat hard to stomach.
Sure, if you approach it with a problem-solving mindset, you can ignore the content and the noise and the inaccuracies of the news, and dig into an issue to be addressed that underlies the story.
But there's only so much thing you can act on at any given moment, and actions take a lot of time. In particular, you can execute one, two business ideas at a time; perhaps three if you're Elon Musk. So once you're engaged in action, what's the point of following the news? You aren't going to act on anything else for the next couple years anyway.
A bunch of times have news stories caused me to donate money and write angry emails to politicians. Especially the horrifying 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
I do the same. If some news is important enough, it'll eventually percolate to HN, or I'll hear about it from someone else.
The way I see it, almost all news is completely irrelevant to my daily life, not actionable in any way, usually depressing, and often very inaccurate. It provides negative information - after consuming them, you end up dumber and more confused than you were before. So I stay away.
I understand why you'd reach this conclusion. I would like to offer another viewpoint for you and others reading this to consider.
Simply put, you are underestimating the impact you have on those around you. Every media literate and well-informed critical thinker has the ability to dramatically change someone's perspective. Not just by knowing what to say, but even more importantly how to listen.
Empathetic 1:1 conversation that is respectful is literally the only way to help people escape their bubbles. If you don't know wtf you're talking about, you're missing every shot you don't take.
Essentially, this would be fine if you lived alone, but in reality when you insulate yourself from politics you're just setting yourself up for frustrating moments where you know that your racist uncle is wrong but you have neither the facts nor the confidence to address his ignorant points in a way that doesn't just boil over into hurt feelings.
In short: this attitude taken to the extreme is an abdication of social responsibility. Much like herd immunity, you don't need to be a hero... just not part of the problem.
I left a longer reply on another comment, but if you're interested and willing, I think that this Big Think clip sums it up (for me): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfWv0EnHQw
Yes, empathetic 1:1 conversation is critical, and yes you can have a huge impact on those around you. But this has nothing to do with keeping up to date with news. Facts will not change your racist uncle's opinion. 99% of the news you consume will have absolutely 0 effect on your ability to convince others to be better.
Develop a vision for your life. Become an expert in topics that are important to you. Read good books, befriend interesting people, and focus on problems where you can make a large difference, and inspire others to do so as well. Daily news plays no role in this.
You are, forgivably, projecting several assumptions onto my words. Give me an attempt to clarify my intent further.
As I explained in another reply, I am not advocating for keeping up to date with the news so much as I refuse to absolve smart people from accepting responsibility for confident media literacy, and it's hard to be media literate without at least parsing what's being reported so that you can reason about it, even amongst people who are in your bubble. I am suggesting that if you think you can avoid this step and still be able to hold your own in a discourse, you are willfully proving the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Our goal should not be to enter a conversation intended to change the racist uncle's opinion. That is, indeed and sadly, a fool's errand. But it's also the wrong tactic.
I would argue that the #1 goal of such a family dinner should be to listen compassionately, being the progressive that defies all of the stereotypes about elitist, know-it-all coastal intellectuals, and choose your battles really, really carefully. At the very least, the other people observing are judging every subtle nuance of what's going down, and even though uncle racist will still likely be a terrible person after dessert, the other six people at the table will find themselves much more confident that you quietly made him look like an asshole.
The left is far too hung up on the shallow win of a "fully pwned" outcome, where the racist uncle is sobbing and begging for forgiveness and promising to lead a better life. Not only is this a stupid goal, it's insulting to the fact that your racist uncle probably has some ideas that are not fully wrong. The notion that the left is right and the right is dumb is roughly 95% of the problem.
I'd prefer that you not put words in my mouth when it's such an important concern. I didn't come close to suggesting that news == critical political theory.
Media literacy is actually the opposite of just consuming a lot of news. There is absolutely a skillset that must be developed and exercised which allows an individual to see patterns and tune their BS detector. News - even FOX "news", contextualized - is all necessary and loaded with information. It just isn't the information Rupert Murdoch and pals consciously engineer.
Late thought: I want to say that as someone who reads or listens to 3-4 books a week, there are a lot of mediocre, terrible books out there. Many non-fiction books are based on opinion instead of research.
Just because something is printed and bound doesn't make it inherently better than a profoundly insightful series of tweets.
Then again, don't believe everything you read in the comments on Hacker News, either.
I came here to say something similar. At least with watching some TV shows or movies, you’re more likely to get de-stressed and/or entertained. News is usually the opposite, creating more frustration, tension and stress about things where you may not be able to do much to help. Whatever is called “news” in today’s world is more of sensational, controversial and divisive stuff. Anything to create an addiction and keep people coming back and arguing is what it’s turned into.
It’s good and also useful sometimes to know what’s happening around, but obsessing with keeping up with news everyday is a huge drain.
I would strongly suggest that anyone in the UK finds a non-UK news source, and SDZ is a good choice. Irish Times also works - not remotely left, but outside the UK bubble.
No paywall. Relatively fast loading, not too annoying site. They're heavy on news, light on opinion, agenda and propaganda. They generally cover anything of consequence globally.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com (follow the right people)
https://reddit.com (follow the right subs)
https://techmeme.com
I'm not in the habit of checking in on individual media outlets, but when I see content from WSJ, Bloomberg, or The Information on any of the above aggregators, I generally like what I see.
https://www.stratechery.com
https://www.vox.com
https://www.vox.com/recode-decode-podcast-kara-swisher
While I didn't find a whole lot of the content I had intended, I think what I did find was interesting, none-the-less. The general opinion here seems to be "news sources suck[0]", especially if it has anything to do with politics/politics-masquerading-as-economics[1]. And community-driven sites tend to become dominated by the fringe of one political persuasion or another. HN does a good job, here, though a look at "new" yields a few headlines who's content can be summarized as "Your politician iz teh satan11", they rarely bubble up, and the ones that do -- even the ones that (headline-wise) I'd probably never click through in another context, I end up appreciating more often than not.
[0] I tend to agree with this and blame much but not all on the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
[1] Replace "economics" with anything else. HN's policy against political-related posts aside, I think this community tends toward skepticism and a lot of political is facts/truth twisted to fit an agenda/bias (intentional or not).
Here's a good list of different newsletters: https://github.com/zudochkin/awesome-newsletters#technology-...
However it failed spectacularly a few years back - A political enemy of the UK prime Minister David Cameron had written a book claiming Cameron had put his (Cameron's) penis into the mouth of a dead pig for a university prank. This had been banned from being repeated in UK media but twitter and non-english sources were full. So satirical programs were simply full of jokes about pigs, oink oink noises and more. They got hilarious reactions from those in the know but I simply had no idea why - it was weeks before the explanation broke somehow
I for years got all of my main news from HIGNFY, Mock the Week and Private Eye. I got most of the nuance, without the outrage. Shame we don't have anything in the UK like The Daily Show, otherwise I probably wouldn't frequent any news sources other than those that skewer it all.
https://news.google.com/?edchanged=1&hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:...
https://www.aldaily.com/
Due to the nature of the medium and the BBC's generally more serious and composed disposition these podcasts tend to be about actually relevant information rather than the outrage-inducing, largely irrelevant rubbish commonly fed by "Now ... this" media.
There's been a clear pro-right trend for a number of years evident most clearly during the most recent election and Scotland's independence referendum of 2014.
Having said that, I think what's more interesting is the BBC's accidental editing of his main opponent in the recent election. That is, the first time they "accidentally" aired 2016 footage, and the second time they "accidentally" edited out the audience laughing at Boris Johnson after he was asked a question.
On both occasions the BBC apologised but I'm not sure it mattered. Obviously this does highlight that since the BBC is willing to do this, how many other times have they done this that hasn't been noticed?
Laura Kuenssberg's Twitter feed was particularly bad. Reporting on advance postal votes: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/11/bbc-denies-pol...
Misreporting a punch, contradicted almost immediately by video: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/10/photo-...
The official BBC line is that these are "mistakes", although they all seem to err in one direction and there is no investigation or plan to reduce the mistakes in the future.
Subjecting everyone except Johnson to interview by Andrew Neil (who is also chairman of Conservative magazine The Spectator) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/01/boris-johnson-...
The BBC doesn’t have the power to subject people to interview by force. If he declines an interview which he is not obligated to give what should they have done?
(a) not announce "interviewing all the leaders" until all the leaders were confirmed. This could be a competence rather than a bias issue; wasn't it Fyre Festival who were announcing acts who they hadn't booked to perform?
(b) empty-chair him
(c) given that Gove and Stanley Johnson (who has no formal position in the party, he's just Johnson's father and now a minor celebrity) turned up to protest outside, they should have been challenged instead
(also, "someone who already edits a partisan political magazine" should be disqualified from senior BBC positions if you're pretending to be impartial)
a) Various leaders agreed to go on a show. Boris Johnson doesn't have to go on the BBC and the BBC can interview who they wish. Andrew Neil likes to make fools of people on his show. He has done it to many politicians of all colours. It is really just a higher brow version of "Ben Shapiro defeats Liberals with facts and logic". Jeremy Corbyn was stupid enough to go on there and get himself shafted by Neil.
b and c) Gove and Stanley Johnson was sent by their party to the debate. Channel 4 (which is mostly publicly funded which most people don't know) did the whole ice sculpture as a stunt. They already bought the sculpture. The
As for the BBC having a "right wing bias". Nothing can be further from the truth. You can go on the website yourself and there are thousands of stories talking about typically left wing talking points.
I am actually building daily news site analysis tool by cobbling together some sources. I am using some fairly simple word analysis techniques (most of the effort is scraping the data from these sites and deciding what constitutes a real news story) and most of the language on the BBC and the Guardian are similar. I suspect that most of them just copy and paste stories tbh.
There is a more serious underlying problem you've spotted, which is "jounalism as stenography". Lots of people can put out press releases, which then really do get copy-pasted into articles. Same with "wire copy" sourced from AP or Reuters. This can be abused by bad actors to get obvious or difficult-to-refute falsehoods into the public memetic consciousness by repeating them.
This is exactly why I started the project also I know there are hit pieces that are coordinated between the news-sites. I wonder how much other news that is reported is also coordinated reporting. However I have no direct proof of this and I cannot start from trying to prove something that I suspect. First I need to collect and analyse data fairly.
So far I've just used newspaper to do the hard work of scraping for me (https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper) some basic filtering techniques e.g. I discard everything that has a question mark at the end of it (Betteridge's law of headlines and an MySQL to store articles etc. Then I run the second script to do some basic string analysis. I am going to be building a small web app to display the results.
So far it is early days (It about 4 or 5 python files and a config file) and I have got two other projects I am working on that probably need completing first.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/31/bbc-election-c...
The right wing in the UK is usually the group most critical of the BBC (AKA "Brussels Broadcasting Corporation").
I would agree that the coverage during the Scottish referendum in 2014 was biased but I think that this is because the BBC is naturally biased towards the status-quo.
Any organisation that can produce The Thick of It being critical of politicians and W1A about its own antics can't be all bad....
Also, the BBC News wing has separate management, some of whom were appointed during Cameron's time in office. So the drama and comedy produced by the BBC can be independent of its news editing.
> I think that this is because the BBC is naturally biased towards the status-quo.
Yes. And fearful of losing funding.
Number of complaints seems a pretty poor measure of bias, but it is one that is often used to reinforce the idea of the BBC's impartiality.
Other people think anything that they disagree with is "biased" and accept only information that confirms what they already believe.
To answer your question: do those on the right say Fox News is biased? Some do, some don't.
(Of course I see a lot of left-lean in a bunch of others.)
Example with Photo: https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-refers-to-el-salvador-guat...
Fox News Headline: "Trump Cuts Aid to 3 Mexican Countries"
Issue: There is only one "Mexican Country" -- Mexico.
Regardless of political leaning, there is an issue with news like this.
I'm right leaning on some issues and left leaning on other issues. If you want right-leaning news, The Wall Street Journal is a far better source for right leaning news. I used to subscribe to the WSJ. Now I subscribe to the Financial Times which conveniently side-steps most US politics alltogether.
Then why has there been more complaints from the right than the left this year about the BBC?
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/dec/31/bbc-election-c...
You do realize that the single claim that you're citing as evidence for the BBC being biased towards the right is from a publisher that is left-leaning?
That's like asking Trump if CNN is "fake news" and citing his only opinion as evidence that CNN is biased against him which is hardly credible.
To my (American) eyes, the BBC has a liberal bias. YMMV, of course.
You'd expect that having the privilege of a royal charter they have a duty to be fair, impartial and balanced. But as shown in recent events and previous scandals, they are becoming a questionable source and still can't help giving coverage towards Twitter spats that isn't worth paying a TV license for.
- BBC news (I try to listen to the daily podcast in the evening). I've a radio too.
- Sham Jaff's https://www.whathappenedlastweek.com/ every week.
And then there are friends who never let you miss any event of importance or otherwise.
PS. HN, for me, is other things but not at all a news source.
English: https://theintercept.com/ https://www.democracynow.org/ https://phys.org/
One is www.ambito.com (That it originates in a financial newspaper, but their politics reporting is very good).
the other is www.tiempoar.com.ar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
It's as close as can possibly be to unbiased, only lists significant events, and it covers world news rather than only focusing on America.
My secondary sources are reddit's /r/OutOfTheLoop, and the chyrons I see whenever I happen to walk by a TV that is playing the news (I learned of the Trump impeachment this way). If something doesn't come up in one of these three sources, it's probably not important enough to be worth the stress/anxiety that following the issue would cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?hidebots=1&hidecategoriza...
> Take any media outlet with a big grain of salt
True. That's why you can't trust a person who gets his/her info only from BBC and NYT anymore than you can trust an engineer who doesn't know Lisp.
I'm also reading The Guardian, it has some nice opinion pieces, but when Australia is on fire the news is how some tourists saved some koalas and it's all well. When the Amazon burns, that's another story.
Al Jazeera is a high-quality news source.
Summarises news (mostly from a US perspective) concisely with options to dive deeper
Russian: https://rt.com
Canadian: https://thepostmillennial.com
Would you like to share your news sources?
"Popular" - lol, chinese state media is an order of magnitude more popular, do you think it's an order of magnitude more trustworthy?
I personally read the economist, ny times, and wsj for short-cycle online content. I listen to npr in the car, and then... I don't know, read constantly? Everything? Tech blogs? trade journals? History books? Literature? Religious shit? I struggle to keep up with the world in a meaningful way. Don't you?
Fox anything drowns itself in the vulgar idiocy of certitude. I can imagine no lesser epistemological sin in 2020.
Read and listen to get data, not to absorb obvious horseshit
I'm living with my parents currently. Their Alexa recommended the following news site, which is quite informative. I'm on the go a lot, looking for a job. Fortunately, my hybrid has a Bluetooth connection to my iPhone which enables me to listen while driving. I'm able to catch the latest headlines each day. It's one of the best-unbiased sources out there. I encourage you to check it out. Best wishes!
https://www.libtards.news/
I know it's offensive to claim it's merely entertainment but in concrete terms there's no material difference resulting from tuning into daily banter that's any different than watching some serial drama on television.
When a US politician does something I find offensive, I do take a few minutes to check to see if they are running for re-election in which case I try to donate $5 to their opponent. Otherwise, I am happy being “apathetic” to politics.
EDIT: I volunteer one day a week at my local food bank, and that helps tie me into local events and what is happening in town. Local news is the most important news to me since I have virtually no effect on the world outside of my local community.
Issues that may affect me (which are more local in nature) will naturally come up in conversation, so I don't think I'm really missing out on anything. I'm not in a position where I can change anything, so why bother wasting my attention on these things?
But I also have to limit my exposure to political news. Otherwise I get too depressed.
It's depressing because consuming content in isolation doesn't materially affect anything. You can't watch your way to political action. It's empty and everyone knows it.
Donate money to causes you care about, attend meetings, help organize things, exercise power.
With that much talk time they have to speculate about what's actually going on. When they speculate wrong it's labeled "Fake News".
Currently USA news media creates division to get eye balls.
Reading a summary of the news weekly keeps you just as informed at watching 24/7
I don't agree with this. The news is filled with actionable information. If nothing more than constant reporting of problems, many of which could be solved with new businesses - there is value in knowing about that if only to be better positioned to start businesses.
The world is full of people in pain, and often the news reports on that. That is actionable information. Other people's pain is not your entertainment. It is actionable information about how to help improve the world and reduce suffering.
Also, the news and happenings of the world do affect you every day even if you don't know it or notice it.
"You may not care about politics, but politics cares about you"
> The world is full of people in pain, and often the news reports on that. That is actionable information. Other people's pain is not your entertainment. It is actionable information about how to help improve the world and reduce suffering.
There is far, far more of this than is actionable, and most of it isn't really actionable from this distance. You end up with "white saviour" disease.
The news is also full of my fellow voters saying that those in pain are lying, or that we should inflict more pain on them as a matter of policy. Those are somewhat hard to stomach.
But there's only so much thing you can act on at any given moment, and actions take a lot of time. In particular, you can execute one, two business ideas at a time; perhaps three if you're Elon Musk. So once you're engaged in action, what's the point of following the news? You aren't going to act on anything else for the next couple years anyway.
The way I see it, almost all news is completely irrelevant to my daily life, not actionable in any way, usually depressing, and often very inaccurate. It provides negative information - after consuming them, you end up dumber and more confused than you were before. So I stay away.
Simply put, you are underestimating the impact you have on those around you. Every media literate and well-informed critical thinker has the ability to dramatically change someone's perspective. Not just by knowing what to say, but even more importantly how to listen.
Empathetic 1:1 conversation that is respectful is literally the only way to help people escape their bubbles. If you don't know wtf you're talking about, you're missing every shot you don't take.
Essentially, this would be fine if you lived alone, but in reality when you insulate yourself from politics you're just setting yourself up for frustrating moments where you know that your racist uncle is wrong but you have neither the facts nor the confidence to address his ignorant points in a way that doesn't just boil over into hurt feelings.
In short: this attitude taken to the extreme is an abdication of social responsibility. Much like herd immunity, you don't need to be a hero... just not part of the problem.
I do agree that a responsible citizen must stay informed. But you need to direct your efforts to the possible and impactful.
Develop a vision for your life. Become an expert in topics that are important to you. Read good books, befriend interesting people, and focus on problems where you can make a large difference, and inspire others to do so as well. Daily news plays no role in this.
As I explained in another reply, I am not advocating for keeping up to date with the news so much as I refuse to absolve smart people from accepting responsibility for confident media literacy, and it's hard to be media literate without at least parsing what's being reported so that you can reason about it, even amongst people who are in your bubble. I am suggesting that if you think you can avoid this step and still be able to hold your own in a discourse, you are willfully proving the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Our goal should not be to enter a conversation intended to change the racist uncle's opinion. That is, indeed and sadly, a fool's errand. But it's also the wrong tactic.
I would argue that the #1 goal of such a family dinner should be to listen compassionately, being the progressive that defies all of the stereotypes about elitist, know-it-all coastal intellectuals, and choose your battles really, really carefully. At the very least, the other people observing are judging every subtle nuance of what's going down, and even though uncle racist will still likely be a terrible person after dessert, the other six people at the table will find themselves much more confident that you quietly made him look like an asshole.
The left is far too hung up on the shallow win of a "fully pwned" outcome, where the racist uncle is sobbing and begging for forgiveness and promising to lead a better life. Not only is this a stupid goal, it's insulting to the fact that your racist uncle probably has some ideas that are not fully wrong. The notion that the left is right and the right is dumb is roughly 95% of the problem.
I am typically not quick to delegate my points to video, but I was really impressed by this Big Think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfWv0EnHQw
If you wanted to become well versed in, say, Marx, you don't get there through watching the news, you just read Marx.
Go on eBay, buy a couple used books, read them instead. They'll have quite a bit more insight than a Twitter stream
Media literacy is actually the opposite of just consuming a lot of news. There is absolutely a skillset that must be developed and exercised which allows an individual to see patterns and tune their BS detector. News - even FOX "news", contextualized - is all necessary and loaded with information. It just isn't the information Rupert Murdoch and pals consciously engineer.
Just because something is printed and bound doesn't make it inherently better than a profoundly insightful series of tweets.
Then again, don't believe everything you read in the comments on Hacker News, either.
It’s good and also useful sometimes to know what’s happening around, but obsessing with keeping up with news everyday is a huge drain.
sciencedaily.com
lobster.rs
a little less technical science news - newatlas.com
I get access to pressreader.com via my local library a/c
- https://morningstaronline.co.uk/ (UK Left news)
- https://www.theguardian.com/international (Int. News)
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world (Int. News)
- https://taz.de/ (German left newspaper)
- https://www.sueddeutsche.de/ (German centrist)
- https://www.theregister.co.uk/ (For IT news)
- https://techcrunch.com/ (For Startup News)
- https://www.nytimes.com/section/smarter-living (For Lifestyle articles)
It seems to be down at the moment.
No paywall. Relatively fast loading, not too annoying site. They're heavy on news, light on opinion, agenda and propaganda. They generally cover anything of consequence globally.
I use Economist for longer-cycle opinion and news.