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Ask HN: Which US news outlets do you still trust?

9 points by g4zj ↗ HN
I'm tired of all the sensationalism and editorialized headlines. Where can I go each day to get a _reasonably_ unbiased take on current events without all the bullshit?

Edit: On the subject, how does NPR hold up these days, in your opinion?

21 comments

[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 59.7 ms ] thread
uberman
BBC world news.

Used to be NPR but they have shifted their focus in way that no longer aligns with my interests.

Really, most US news strikes me as overly partisan.

shrimp_emoji
The US should do something like the BBC, as un-American as it is. Tax-funded state journalism with a "political views must be equally represented in the staff" requirement.

The closest is C-SPAN, but they're basically just Congress's A/V club.

It'd be nice to still have corporate journalism, ideally, but the economic model isn't there anymore, and, without it, there's too many toxic incentives like rage baiting and audience capture.

tetris11
BBC News in the UK is the most no-merit news channel in the country. They are sympathetic to the Tories almost to the point of parody.

Al-Jazeera beats them to any real headlines every time. They have had no groundbreaking reporting for decades.

uberman
Compared to US News they seem non-partisan but I'll accept that as a Brit, you can see their leaning. I'm not really interested in fast or ground breaking news in general. I feel like the 24 hours constant news cycle is a negative thing not a positive thing. I used to pay attention to CNN but I really can't stomach their efforts to make a huge deal about every trivial thing.
edwrenbeck
Timely ask given this article posted today from a well known NPR contributor: https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-tru...

I was a big fan of NPR and built one of the most popular NPR apps at the dawn of the iPhone. Now, I rarely listen anymore. I'm looking for news news and all that is available today is opinion news.

I think Breaking Points YouTube channel started off right. Unfortunately, they have veered off course recently, with each host presenting a one-sided opinion about the topics they are passionate about.

These days, I basically browse the explore option on Substack and hope to find interesting articles. https://substack.com/browse/business

probably_jesus
Yeah I liked breaking points when it was just the two original hosts even though it was still opinionated. Honestly the podcast scene has just turned into cable news
uberman
After getting past the lightning rod "orange man bad" and "laptop gate" preamble, I found that npr oped to be mostly spot on unfortunately. This from a life long npr listener who leans left.
jmondi
That he is orange is just a fact. What makes him a bad man is everything else he does.
mindcrime
Depends on what you mean by "trust".

As far as meaning "believe they don't just completely fabricate things from whole cloth, etc." then I guess I trust them all about equally. So CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox, whoever. For the most part, if a media outlet reports that "Event X happened" I believe that it really did happen.

Now if you mean "trust them to report events in an unbiased and spin-free manner without slant of any sort" then the answer is "I trust none of them." I assume every media outlet is biased to some degree, and always spin articles to reflect their underlying biases in some way.

So mostly I skip around, if something really catches my interest I'll read articles from multiple sources and try to figure out how to interpret things in light of what's known about the biases of the different outlets. Beyond that, I do slightly favor reading about US events from an international perspective, so I read BBC News, The Guardian, etc. I'm sure they are still biased in some way, but you do get a take that's at least slightly different than the bog standard US media orgs.

baggy_trough
I think it's basically impossible. You have to triangulate by reading multiple sources. NYT and some conservative leaning paper for example.
brodouevencode
I'm very skeptical of all of it. Here's the rule that I use - if more than a couple of known partisanly-opposite sources (CNN vs. Fox News, for example) report the same thing, then it's probably true. Otherwise I only believe it if it aligns with what I know to be true or have observed.

This is admittedly dangerous for all the obvious reasons. But given that I have seen nearly all sources seemingly intentionally misreport facts and even contradict themselves multiple, multiple times I don't know who to believe, so I'm left to my own experiences as the ultimate source of truth.

I do find that business news (Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC) do a better job of conveying news rather than being pundits. BBC World News and NHK News also do a pretty good job on the international front.

idbnstra
Reuters and Associated Press maybe?
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blackeyeblitzar
In theory you could pick one of the center biased news outlets listed at All Sides (https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart). But in reality, I think you have to consume multiple new sources with different biases to understand a story well. From their FAQ “Does a Center Rating Mean Neutral, Unbiased, and Better?” on the same page:

> Center doesn't mean better! A Center media bias rating does not mean the source is neutral, unbiased, or reasonable, just as Left and Right do not necessarily mean the source is extreme, wrong, or unreasonable. A Center bias rating simply means the source or writer rated does not predictably publish content that tilts toward either end of the political spectrum — conservative or liberal. A media outlet with a Center rating may omit important perspectives, or run individual articles that display bias, while not displaying a predictable bias. Center outlets can be difficult to determine, and there is rarely a perfect Center outlet: some of our outlets rated Center can be better thought of as Center-Left or Center-Right, something we clarify on individual source pages.

> While it may be easy to think that we should only consume media from Center outlets, AllSides believes reading in the Center is not the answer. By reading only Center outlets, we may still encounter bias and omission of important issues and perspectives. For this reason, it is important to consume a balanced news diet across the political spectrum, and to read horizontally across the bias chart.

hash07e
None.

4chan is better.

Seriously

gaws
> 4chan is better.

> Seriously

Yikes.

mikewarot
I stopped trusting NPR after their blatant distortion of the coverage of Bernie Sanders back in 2016.

He won the Iowa caucuses, yet they didn't utter his name in the subsequent week, as far as I could tell.

interbased
I trust what I can verify. Whenever I read an article, I trace down the source of any claims. Whether it be another article or press release, a study, the original statement that someone made on a show or something similar, if it’s verifiable then that’s that. In terms of claims, you really just need to know what to research, and find the original source of information.

Unfortunately, that does take time and effort.