HN Explorer

Ask HN: What news sources do you use to maintain a broad perspective?

23 points by JadoJodo ↗ HN
I'm setting up my feed reader and wanted to get some perspectives on good, quality sources for news. In particular, I'm interested in good sources for US news, international news, and left-leaning sources. I lean conservative, so I've already identified several sources that lean in that direction, but I'm happy to hear more.

68 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread
warrenm
I use a site I built for this purpose - datente.com

I subscribe to feeds I agree with

And ones I don't

And ones that may (or may not) happen to have interesting items periodically

JadoJodo
> datente.com

This is fascinating. I'll bookmark and revisit later. Thanks!

warrenm
Sure thing :)

If you'd like to see what drives it (nothing too groundbreaking), I'm happy to share :)

menotyou
Do you provide a RSS feed for this?
warrenm
It's not [yet] republishing the subscribed feeds into an amalgamated one
agomez314
WSJ, Daily Wire, Washington Post, HN (obvi), Twitter, Politico, NYPost are a few i like to use. I've found that following prominent people on particular niches on Twitter give more nuanced, intelligent takes than popular news headlines would lead you to suggest.
h2odragon
https://www.wsws.org/

https://www.zerohedge.com/

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/

cover a pretty broad "general" view to begin with. start there, and add from sources they tap, too.

jl6
I'm not familiar with the third link but the first two are prime wacko-left and wacko-right, and reality is unlikely to inhabit the midpoint.
h2odragon
The wider ones perspective, the greater chance of seeing some truth. Still not a big chance, mind you.
dahart
In the past I would have fully agreed with this idea in general, and it still has a ring of believability. But, there hasn’t ever been more evidence that this is not true when it comes to extreme politics than the last year. Getting more misinformation in your diet does not increase your chances of seeing any truth.
h2odragon
How can you get anything but misinformation? We can barely understand bits of the world around us, and our efforts to communicate that understanding to each other are imperfect to the point we're really just making noises at each other and hoping to stimulate similar thinking, at best.

Anybody who takes the effort to publish something; from the most respected journalist, rank government propaganda, and me writing this comment: all have reasons for expending that effort in addition to the "i want to share what i think is true", which we hope was the main reason.

We have to read everything with the filter of "why does this person want me to think this?"

"mis / dis / information" is a spectrum, and we have to see the shading in everything we consume.

dahart
Again, specious platitudes that I could agree with in general in an ideal world, but do not apply to extreme politics and disinformation campaigns. The difference between the journal “Nature” and Qanon is not “shading”. One genuinely intends to be true, and the other is purposely pushing information known to be false. One is open about it’s sources and methods, the other is not. One has a repeatable methodology, the other doesn’t. One puts their names on their publications, the other doesn’t. One is comfortable with subtlety and seeks truth, the other is a sales pitch that preys on fear and emotion. Suggesting they’re both shades of the same misinformation with the same flawed agendas and that you can’t get anything but misinformation ever is exactly what the most extreme right wing agenda wants; it has been systematically attacking public trust in science, and it’s working. This is precisely why ingesting it does not increase your chances of seeing truth, it only does damage and add FUD and confusion.
rossdavidh
I like the daily email 1440, which provides a quick summary of the day's news, with links to a variety of news sources if you want more detail. https://join1440.com/
JadoJodo
I'll have to give it a go! Thanks.
blablabla123
The Guardian is great, also I think they still have a free full text feed (although I think donations are appreciated)
lma21
where can I find the full text feed?
[dead] atc
It _really_ isn't.
zzzeek
since you asked for "left leaning" and you are looking to have sources from all "sides", you should check out the New Republic and Mother Jones, in addition to mostly middle of the road picks like Washington Post (edit: yes and also The Guardian as someone else mentioned). I also highly recommend Talking Points Memo. Clearly not the HN user's cup of tea but that's what we libs are reading.
SirensOfTitan
Just don’t read the news: it’s an addictive consumer product developed to keep folks on all sides of the spectrum continuously in crisis mode.
NoImmatureAdHom
Yes, I support this perspective. You will get the news anyway, whether you like it or not.
63
This perspective is a tiny bit exaggerated, but not by much. You don't need the vast majority of the news, especially not at the rate it's published. If it's important, it will get to you. If you really need to stay informed, maybe check things out once a week, after the stories have been developed.
keb_
Obligatory re-post of Aaron Swartz's blogpost: https://archive.md/KavvY

I also decided a while ago to quit reading the news everyday, partly inspired by Aaron's post. I no longer feel ashamed to be uninformed. Also, weird side-effect, but I find that I'm much more humble when engaging in political discussions with colleagues now and less inclined to go on a rant.

pixxel
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”

~unknown

Ocerge
I agree with this, but I would place a larger emphasis on Breaking News being something one should actively avoid. Unless it's a 9/11-level event, or you are in imminent danger (which is highly unlikely), you don't need to know about it until the facts are out.
tablespoon
> Just don’t read the news: it’s an addictive consumer product developed to keep folks on all sides of the spectrum continuously in crisis mode.

You're painting with way too broad a brush. It's like saying the internet is just there to addict you so you click ads. Sure that's true if you only consider Facebook et al., but there's more to the internet than that.

It's better advice to avoid cable "news" and opinion columnists that align too strongly with your prejudices.

The news pages from high quality outlets like the AP, NYT, WSJ, etc. are fine, and there aren't really any good substitutes for them. Similarly, it's good to read opinions you disagree with, but it's maybe better to read someone with a "heterodox" opinion than hate read someone with an orthodox opinion from the "other side."

NikolaNovak
I read daily :

Axios - good format that makes it easy to explore in as much depth as desired. As objective as anything I've seen ((understanding we are all human).

Guardian - avoid opinions columns. At times it gets too preachy even if I agree in principle so I read a bit of fox news monthly just to reset :->

Al Jazeera - increasingly find them more readable and detached than some more popular north American sources

I renew my Stratfor subscription every now and then.

dhimes
As an American I find Al Jazeera indispensable. It's the only place I can get the context for things going on in the Middle East aside from friends who are from there.
TessierLabs
Summary sites that list "What the papers say" for your country of choice, e.g. for the UK the BBC "Newspaper headlines" [1] gives the front page of the major papers. It's pretty interesting to see how papers owned by the same parent company will present the same news with pretty much opposite takes on it.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-58591785

memling
> It's pretty interesting to see how papers owned by the same parent company will present the same news with pretty much opposite takes on it.

Ideally you'd get this from the same paper, and not different papers in the same family.

wppick
The economist and non fiction books. You will learn more about the world by reading about, rhetoric, linguistics, cognition, psychology, and history than you will from news, which is usually extremely transient and not important a few months after.
Witeshadow
They can be pretty biased though. But good source of a lot of topics and being aware of bias helps since it can't really be eliminated.
amar-laksh
https://www.improvethenews.org/ This is pretty handy. Started by physicist Max Tegmark, it uses classifiers to show news based on different settings you can adjust (Political stance, depth, shelf-life etc.)
GDC7
Associated Press

Agènce France Press

Reuters

They keep it real. They report, they don't speculate or opinionate on matters.

troyvit
I agree with other posts that national and international news is often just click bait designed to enrage. "If it bleeds it leads."

Local news however can be a different story. Don't get me wrong there's some awful stuff there too (lookin' at you Sinclair) but the things that truly affect you rarely happen at the national level. City council meetings, your local culture, hell how Covid is doing in your town ... all those things have a lot more effect on your life than almost anything at the national level.[0] Hell if your ad blocker is off you're even ostensibly helping local companies by viewing and clicking their ads.

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/why-does-loca...

hprotagonist
npr, csmonitor, axios, reuters, and primary sources.
SethMurphy
I make a habit of reading the headlines of at least three major news websites daily (Fox, CNN, NY Times), in addition to reading articles mostly on one. This doesn't mean I really know what's going on, but at least I know what people think is going on which seems to be as important these days. Oh, and of course HN.
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JohnDeHope
You asked for specifically left-leaning so I'll leave out all the usual wacko-right stuff. Most of this stuff is not left as in liberal, but is more left as in not right. Some of it is not news exactly, but content that is a barometer for where center and left thinking is trending. - Moon of Alabama - Glenn Greenwald - No Mercy / No Malice - Perception Indexed

I'd like to see your wacko-right content list, if you don't mind.

4TunateSon
For the public health/healthcare inclined, I like Kaiser Health News.
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