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Reliable Sources of News

Arg9

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Arg9
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Aug 14, 2006
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This could go in several topics, but since I'm mostly interested in news about politics, I'll put the thread here.

I'm wondering which source any of you would recommend for reliable news...as much as possible with no doctoring, etc. Or accused of being more "liberal" or "conservative".

I'm mostly curious about online sources consistently kept up-to-date, though magazines and newspapers are fine too. Even a good book. I'll embarrassingly admit I've been in my own world for awhile and out of the loop and am educating myself on politics to get my brain charged again on the subject. Probably something that has to do with maturity and realizing how much I'm (we're) getting screwed over. There's too much going on to ignore and I need the most reliability possible in what I'm reading. And all of you were the first people I could think of to find advice (versus the people I work with who believe in psychics).

Oh yeah, I'm in the US if that helps.

thanks in advance. In the meantime, I'll just check out The Onion again :D
 
I'm a big fan of The Grey Lady for national US news and international news. The opinions stay in the opinion section for the most part. Of course, nothing's 100% reliable and the NYT is no exception (Jayson Blair for example) but overall I would say you can call it reliable. The Washington Post is another good bet. Bloomberg.com is decent for financial news.

Google News is a good jumping off-point for news because:
1) You can see multiple articles on any news event, so that you can cross-check. Of course not everything linked by Google news is reliable though, but by cross-checking you can increase reliability yourself.
2) You can get behind the paywall of the The Wall Street Journal for example if you go through Google News rather than navigating on their website.
 
You know though I definitely do checkout the gasbags on fox and the empty-headed types like Candy Crowley and John King on CNN - sometimes its useful to understand what the boilerplate conservative position is (fox) or what direction the nattering nabob horse-race talk is going to take (Crowley/King). You cant really go wrong with Zakaria's GPS every sunday either (and I record Bill Moyers every Friday on PBS too).

As for print sources, I really like the New York Review of Books for the depth of its writing and length of its articles. Such a wide variety of topics too - usually lots of politics but also good stuff on history, sociology and the like too.

Always interesting stuff in The American Conservative and its blog.

I like Steve Coll on war matters, Foreign Policy has great hubs for Afpak and governance issues, Sullivan as a gatherer of all kinds of news and opinions, Conor Friedersdorf always impresses me with his writing and thinking, Greenwald of course is incisive and engaging. Simon Johnson's blog on economics is essential. And if I wanna know about how the militia/patriot nexus is doing I look up Neiwert at his own blog or at C+L (which seems to be getting more of his attention these days).
 
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Arg9 said:
I'm wondering which source any of you would recommend for reliable news...as much as possible with no doctoring, etc. Or accused of being more "liberal" or "conservative".
Click to expand...
NPOV news is--in my POV anyway--exceedingly boring. I suspect that is one of the reasons it is hard to find (see wikinews and other user-contributed types for example). I consider the BBC and the Economist and the FT and the WSJ to be less politically biased than average, but they still have definite leanings (liberal for the first three which come out of London, conservative for the fourth which comes out of New York). Others will disagree with me.

My solution to news for the last couple of years is to use RSS or Twitter feeds and to load up links to sources that are decidedly not NPOV and are from all over the spectrum, then at least you can do the balancing yourself. (Plus of course you can filter for the type of coverage you're interested in)
 
I am not convinced that one can get a completely well-rounded understanding of a complex story from any single news source, although I will not go so far as to accuse every source of having a political agenda that colors all their stories. Sometimes something important gets left out just because of editing for space considerations. I think the best one can do is divide one's time between 3 or 4 sources and then when a story catches one's eye, look up more details on the internet.

. . . . . . . . . .
Fagin may be right in that TDS might make a good addition to a list of sources. It is good at cutting through the formal spin process.
 
NPR does a decent job on its straight news reporting.

Personally, ABC also seems to be more objective than the other two major networks, but that may be confirmation bias or a similar phenomenon at work.
 
I get my news from this forum. Anything in the news that I would find newsworthy usually has a thread about it here.
(But I also check out cnn's webpage every once in a while)
 
There are no reliable sources of news -- that's why we have freedom of the press.
 
Arg9 said:
I'm wondering which source any of you would recommend for reliable news...as much as possible with no doctoring, etc. Or accused of being more "liberal" or "conservative".
Click to expand...

I would also recommend the BBC, especially for its international news. They cover a lot of ground. I also like to read them to get a non-U.S. perspective on U.S. politics.

Are you a student? Your university library might have access to many online editions of major newspapers, even the ones behind paywalls. Ask them if you can get access through them. Sometimes you can even plug into their network from anywhere, so long as you have some affiliation with that school.

Some of the more arcane topics require a different level of coverage, however, and that's where specialist blogs come in. I know where the authors are coming from, and I usually go to the source articles they link to so I can get the plain story. For example, for science news and woo analysis I follow blogs such as Bad Astronomy and Neurologica, and for reportage on the extreme Right in the U.S. I'll read Dave Neiwert or Talk2Action.
 
Unbiased is boring. BBC and NPR are for the straight news.

I have Fox on almost all the time. Online I check out DailyKos, HuffingtonPost, and Drudge by and by, just to see what they are talking about.

Heritage and Cato for traditional, conservative thinktank.

Queerty and Socialist Worker for radical views.

I avoid Newsweek, WSJ, and other ones that may be biased, but in a less obvious way, and they give similar talking points. Bias gives context to stories.

And don't count on one source to tell you everything about an issue. Use Google to search on the topic and you will find many blogs that offer unique POVs.

Daily Show and Colbert also do good in depth, occasionally. They are mainly funny.
 
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If there was someone as careful and sort of neutral as Rachel Maddow on the right I would watch them. I stopped watching Keith Olbermann a while back, except for the guffaw factor.
 
"Biased" news isn't always bad. Reading a very slanted view can sometimes be quite informative, so long as the facts aren't distorted.

The Wall Street Journal used to be a great source of news, despite its bias. Since the Murdoch acquisition, though, it's just a piece of junk that makes it a bit like a highbrow version of Fox News.

I still read National Review Online for a conservative viewpoint. They are predictably conservative, but they generally don't engage in the sort of ridiculous distortions and half truths found in the above sources.
 
Thanks everybody for input.

Unbiased would be nice, but you're right about having a biased perspective in the mix. I did manage to catch two good back-to-back interviews on Charlie Rose (PBS) the other night. It was a democrat's perspective on the Health Care followed up with the a republican's view which was excellent to hear. I was glad that both parties were given the opportunity to express their views.

I'll check out a lot of sources mentioned in this thread. Thanks again!
 
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