I’m enjoying Lemmy so far, for the most part.
Everything here is pretty good save for the fact that all the news and politics I can find is dominated by the same few accounts.
Half or more of the accounts have a very clear agenda. They modify headlines. Lie. Spread disinformation. And generally are just extremely toxic groups.
It doesn’t seem to be a secret here either. And moderators appear to have no interest in putting a stop to it.
So, where are you subbed to for reliable news and US/Global politics?
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Half or more of the accounts have a very clear agenda.
Everyone has an agenda; if this makes you uncomfortable, strengthen your critical thinking skills.
The desire for a neutral source is a desire to stop thinking critically about the information you consume.
Well said and yea if you find a “unbiased source” for news, you’ve only fallen for their bias.
Be critical even of what interests you, and read things you don’t like as well.
This is just wrong as a general statement.
Across the world there are a lot of news sources that give their best to be neutral and objective.
After reading all the comments here I’m starting to realize that Lemmy is very jaded. Explains why things are such a mess maybe.
That’s something that a lot of people miss, though: in many cases you can’t be both neutral and objective. If one assessment of an issue is objectively true and the other is preposterous, neutrality itself is a subjective bias.
Non-exhaustive list of topics where a false equivalence neutrality actually distorts reality: climate change, evolution of the species; poverty and the roots thereof; racism and other discrimination; crime and the “justice” system in general.
Name one.
Reuters & Associated Press
They focus on America, as such have a broadly Western bias. Are they less biased than others? Probably. But you cannot report the news without some form of bias. The act of looking at an event and deciding what facts to include and what to leave out introduces some level of bias. As it is impossible to include every detail of an event, especially in text form, you’ll end up with a biased retelling
Almost all of the news sources around the world have news sites. I cannot keep up unless I only read those sites that have excellent reputations for being factual. Al Jazerra, BBC, The Guardian, the Independent, LeMonde, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washinton Post are on my political list. (Yes, it leans left). Credibility problem has made it harder to find right sources that I can trust.
My favorite lists are for STEM subjects. Facts, science and economics will shape how our world looks. Facts are the focus in this realm. If I only looked at Pulitzer Prize winners, I would have a good list
FWIW, my bias is our environment. Screwing that up makes most other biases moot.
You listed a bunch of neoliberal ideology reinforcing news sources and then said you lean left. If those are your news sources you’re on the right my friend.
And the BBC (though I know there are some concerns about their UK coverage)
Ground news is pretty good.
I love ground news. But they just give you information on the bias of their sources, they aren’t unbiased themselves. You get a better picture but you are still getting it from biased sources
True. It’s interesting to read a right leaning perspective and a left leaning one of the same story though.
the theory that neutrality is objective is fucking mind numbing. the right wing reactionary perspective is never, has never been, and will never be grounded in anything resembling facts. they consistently disregard actual evidence to promote bigotry and divide the working class.
Second for ground news!
More to the point: where does anybody go for any reliable news? It seems like most news is now using hyperbole to make it entertainment. We have old man Rupert to thank for basically destroying a respected profession. That’s my 0.02 anyhow.
While not perfect AP and Reuters are ok. The news they report is honest but their shortcoming is what they don’t report.
This is how I do it as well. In general, understanding the overall bias of each news organization is more important to keeping yourself informed. You can combat the echo chamber effect by knowing what the biases of each source is and using differing sourcing to try to get as complete a picture as you can.
I would add to your list to check BBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR if you’re US focused.
I am curious war the bias of Reuters is?
As the original comment implied, AP News and Reuters are reasonably unbiased in reliable in terms of their coverage. They do have a US focus so a lot of the pieces need to be read through that specific lens. Sometimes the omission of information is just as important and what is included.
I haven’t found any issues with Reuters but AP did this which is suspect on many levels:
Migrant Boat NFT
On January 10, 2022, AP announced it would start selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of their photographs in partnership with a company named Xooa, with the proceeds being used to fund their operations.[103] One of the NFTs they promoted on Twitter on 24 February was an aerial shot depicting an overcrowded migrant boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The tweet received negative backlash from users and other journalists, with AP being accused of profiting off of human suffering and the picture choice being “dystopian” and “in extremely poor taste”. The tweet was subsequently deleted and the NFT, which was to be sold the next day, was pulled from market. Global director of media relations Lauren Easton apologized, saying “This was a poor choice of imagery for an NFT. It has not and will not be put up for auction […] AP’s NFT marketplace is a very early pilot program, and we are immediately reviewing our efforts”.[104][105]
They aren’t great when you see a lot of their stories go by at one time, it’s not consistent.
Those are pretty good examples. They are still not great places to go but they certainly suck a whole lot less than the others. Hell, even the weather is now being reported as entertainment.
I wish for AP to have RSS feeds, but they don’t. I think they and Reuters are aome of the better outlets out there and I’ve been (re)discovering RSS lately, but AP is one of the few news outlets that don’t seem to support it :(
RSSbridge may have you covered there! They’ve got a bunch of instances running you can check!
Interesting! I’m going to look into it, thanks!
Quite right, AP do have rss news feeds (rsshub is one - amongst others) - there are posts on lemmy related to this topic.
I find these two to be good for finding sources with different perspectives:
After some time, you might see that there are a few specific sites that you like, and you can just start going to them directly.
+1 to Ground News. I browsed them with a free account for a short time before subscribing to the middle tier. Their tools are really terrific at getting me to look at multiple sides of the same stories, and the blind spot feature is fantastic. I’ve been very satisfied with it and go to it multiple times a day.
I also enjoy ground news.
This is awesome, I’m going to check it out, thank you.
The Flipside is also excellent at providing balanced views and counterpoints. It’s a newsletter rather than a site though. (Full disclosure: that’s a referral link. I figured why not).
I’m also partial to The Week which also presents a wide array of views - though it admittedly leans left.
I’ve been getting flipside emails for a while now. I really like them.
I just took a look at both of them and found that I really like https://ground.news
AP and Reuters run the stories and everyone adds their opinions on top of that, or they rehash some Twitter thread. NPR tends to take those news stories and at least bring in competent analysts in to speak about them. I’d stick with those 3, for the most “fair” view of the happenings in the world.
NPR and PBS, publicly funded does not mean government controlled.
I subscribe to WSJ, NYT, WAPO, and my local newspaper. You need to read all sides of a story in order to get a reliable take.
Also recommend: Memeorandum to see multiple sources to same story.
I would argue trying to find news on social media is the big mistake. It’s absolutely bad on Lemmy, but it’s not that much better on other platforms. Any story that isn’t a “win” for the larger portion of people on the platform will naturally struggle to get attention.
There’s a whole rabbit hole to go down in trying to find a way to get a solid, rounded and accurate view of current events, but imo step one should be to throw away social media as a news source. It’s only popular because the algorithms on other platforms will tell people what they want to hear.
God damn that’s a great point.
News is only remotely viable when done by a professional organization that at least tries to be impartial. You don’t want your news to be filtered by upvotes at the end of the day. Never really considered that.
Yup, especially on sites like Reddit or Lemmy where voting exists. The news you see will be the news that agrees with the majority opinion of the site. This isn’t inherently negative as long as one is aware of it, but it seems too many people are unaware of their own echo chambers.
This is unhelpful, but… I just don’t look at the news. If something actually important happens, I’ll hear about it indirectly and go look it up if I care, but I’ve found that not being tapped into the news (and especially political news) all day every day does wonders for my mental health.
Same
If you don’t read the news, you’re uninformed. If you read the news, you’re misinformed
Easy. Don’t get your news from social media.
Get your news from Reuters or The AP or something. Come to social media to discuss the news but step 0 is go somewhere else.
People post links to those places here. That’s what this person is asking.
This is a lot closer to link aggregation than social media.
Subscribe to a bunch of rss feeds you like on your phone
Probably not what you want to hear but I’ve been absolutely bombarded with the right wing perspective my entire life and I’m pretty glad to have a place that doesn’t try to both sides everything. Where do I get my news? Twitter mostly I come here if I want to see something discussed further
Set up an Rss feed for AP and Reuters
As others have said, you have to think critically about every piece of news you read. Ask yourself what the opposite side on a story might think, or look for an alternative opinion. If you’re reading an article in The Economist, read an article in Le Monde Diplomatique on the same subject. If you’re reading something about Russia in the Washington Post, read an article in RT on the same topic. Think critically, and the truth is likely somewhere between the two opposing points.
International mass media is a form of soft power for countries to exert influence. It’s not a conspiracy it’s a tool available to governments which is why you have the BBC, CGTN, RT, PressTV, CBC, etc. That the mass media in the USA is mostly private doesn’t change that fact and make it more independent, because the USA is essentially an ogliopoly.
Did you apply your critical thinking to this answer?
If you did, I’m gonna have to advise you to take your own advice, since this answer in no way answers the question.
So, if I think critically, the truth is somewhere in the middle?
Apologies if I said something to invite your passive aggressive response. You do seem quite passively calling out a few accounts but won’t mention them, I’m curious as to your politics now. Do you think it works like your neighborhood association where if you don’t say the word that people will get it and it will protect you from revealing your bias?
You came here and explained a bunch of nonsense. That’s why you got a passive aggressive response.
Your comment is not only jaded and wrong, but it’s also not what I asked. You just came here to pontificate about your conspiracy theories about the media.
Which, for the record, is exactly sort of stuff this post was inspired by. Hyperbole and dribble. You didn’t say anything of substance. You just talked down to me and rambled on about how nobody can trust the news. And that, is nonsense.
Replace the word “news” with “historical document” and OP is discussing how to conduct academic research.
Man, this whole thread has tried my patience. It’s as if not a single Lemmy user thinks that current events are worth following.
I’m not sure where everyone is getting their information, but this response is sorta terrifying.
Current events are certainly worth following and Lemmy could be a great place to add comments, ask questions and find additional context. A bot to scrape a relevant subreddit if content is needed.
Complaining about bias is what I was addressing. You can get unbiased media. Al-jazeera is surprisingly good for world news.
Isn’t Al-Jazeera a state-owned Saudi network? I’d trust them about as much as RT, Fox, CNN, or TikTok.
I wasn’t complaining about bias though. That’s the thing. I was asking for reliable news aggregation on Lemmy. Big difference
Nobody here seems to understand that though. Or, very few.
I know news is bias. That isn’t the point. It’s the posting of blogs, YouTube videos, altering headlines, using alts to brigade voting and push an agenda… Here, on Lemmy, not in the media.
The media is a known commodity. If I read an MSN article, I know their bias. If I read a fox news article, I definitely know their bias.
A bunch of edgy “communists” and qanon accounts manipulating the large news and politics community ON LEMMY is the point. Not the news
You didn’t say anything of substance.
He actually did but your mind is rejecting it.
Nobody can trust the news. That’s not nonsense, it’s a fact. There are no reliable news sources.
You can either deal with it or pretend that the source you find most comforting is the absolute truth and totally unbiased. But then you’d be lying to yourself, which is usually what makes people get defensive 🤔
Your definition of the word fact is seriously questionable.
What is the news? How can you arrive at a definition of what constitutes the news without introducing bias?
Okay. Fine. So, what is the solution then?
Nobody should pay attention to anything? Where should I get my information? Should I visit all the people and ask them?
How am I going to find out what happened today at the NATO Summit? Should I have gone to Lithuania and attended the summit in person?
Is it alright if I read the article on NPR that explains what legislation past the Senate in the US? Or do I need to go visit the Senate myself so I can eliminate NPR’s bias?
I’m very interested in science. Climate change and physics specifically. Where should I find out about the latest discoveries in science? Do I need to read all of the journals myself? Cuz, if so, I’m fucked. I don’t have that sort of time.
And, admittedly, even though I consider myself well informed, I’m just not up to speed on all of the equations in astrophysics. So, now, I’m really fucked. Do I need to know a physicist personally so I can ask them?
Sorry you feel/think that way.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/Sl4fvgWJjGA?t=56
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
What specifically do you want lemmy mods to “stop?” What kind of lies are they spreading? What do you consider disinformation. Complaining that your world view isn’t being catered to is a lot less useful then pointing out specific things you find sus.
I read the Newsletters from NPR and Morning Brew. If something catches my eye, I’ll look it up on ground.news then find something marked “center” to get more details.
But, isn’t that sort of the point of Lemmy? Link aggregation?
I’ve been going to all the individual sites as well since leaving Reddit. But, only because the news and politics culture in Lemmy is so atrocious.
Despite its faults, Reddit did an okay job of moderation. It’s a shit show here. The posts are all either bots or edgy 8th graders from troll communities. It’s a mess.
Someone (maybe you?) is going to have to be the place to go to as a place to trust to not alter headlines and aggregate. This issue here now is moderation, one person can’t do it all but no one wants to do it either
Ha, man, finally, 20 comments in and someone understands the question.
Based on all the responses so far I’m assuming a well moderated place doesn’t exist on Lemmy yet, which is disappointing. I was hoping I just hadn’t discovered it yet.
The lemmy.world politics posts and feels like the one at Reddit but also includes all of the trolls. I’ve seen it be successful at Reddit when it’s heavily moderated but that’s a lot of work. It’s too bad that the news stations or agencies don’t get together and put up their own instance. On Mastodon they have an aggregator that posts from all of the most reliable sources but no one uses it to talk really. I think there is a solution that hasn’t been thought of yet.
Yeah, it just doesn’t really exist yet. I’m not sure a really well-moderated community for news content can exist yet on Lemmy, due to the culture that’s slowly springing up, but if it did it’d have to be on a dedicated instance, I expect - one with a very, very dedicated set of moderators with relatively strict rules regarding what is sufficiently-well-sourced content, and all other communities on the instance being held up to the same bar in their specific niches in order to encourage that kind of posting culture.
Honestly, I don’t think Reddit ever achieved a really good result either - the news subreddits were all dumpster fires to varying degrees - but Lemmy’s immaturity worsens the issue here, I think. It’s pretty appallingly obvious. I’d look elsewhere for news opinion aggregation, for the time being.
I think Reddit did a better job than you give them credit for. The may not have achieved eutopia, but they outperform all others who’ve tried up until this point.
Lemmy has more promise than Reddit, IMO, for well moderated news aggregation because they’ve seen the reddit model and can replicate it without the bondage of Reddit administration.
The problem, as it seems to me currently, is that Lemmy, specifically in the news and politics realm, lacks moderation of any quality. And, that’s not necessarily a shot at moderators either. They’re either new to the roll or there aren’t enough of them.
They also don’t have the benefit of year of users removed and shaping the rules that govern a community, as Reddit has had.
So you want currated news, why are you here?
Kind of, yes? I’ve commented on it more than once here.
This is the point you’re missing. Although, I guess I’m glad you’ve stuck around… For some reason…
A place where you have a variety of well vetted sources. A place where you don’t have to wade through a sea of “Hunter Biden’s laptop”, “lizard men” and Infowarriors.
Does news have a slant? Yes. Am I well aware of that? Yes.
The difference is, there’s no longer a “both sides”. I’m not interested in what some qanon blogger thinks about the Senate. And, here on Lemmy, that goal is achievable. And, I would argue, close.
However, the problem here is that you have bad actors operating unchecked. That is a problem of an immature platform, not an inherent problem with news in general as you’ve spent a lot of time and words intimating to me.
So, as we bring this bad boy around full circle and I put this behind me; the question is, is there a place for reliable news and politics? The answer to that question is, apparently, not yet. But, I’ll hold out hope that it happens because Lemmy is a promising platform that has a lot growing up to do.
What you’re looking for doesn’t exist and will probably never exist in our lifetimes. If you want some (USA) sites that aggregate news and provide an interpretation on it; nakedCapitalism, ZeroHedge (you won’t like), The Register, Breaking Points, MintPress News, RealClearPolitics.
Sigh… Nevermind. Thanks for trying. You and I live in two different realities. God speed
I don’t get my news from any social media platform, including lemmy, no offense to lemmy. I used to do that with reddit, but it’s just too unhinged getting your news that way.
I stick with Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times, in that order. I also use Google News specifically for local news, but I don’t even peek at the main world news feed there.
More generally speaking, I stick to the old school human editorial board for my news. News that’s presented to me on AP, for example, has already been filtered by a board of humans who are smarter than me and whose opinions I trust on the state of the world. Opening up your selection of news to an easily gameable social media algorithm is just more trouble than it’s worth, in my opinion.
Sorry, I have to admit that I’m not the best at keeping up with LGBTQ+ news, so I wasn’t aware of that controversy. I’ll keep an eye on that and see how it shakes out. If NYT continues to stir controversy, then I can switch. I’m not particularly attached to them. Washington Post would be a good replacement, and I saw that GLAAD article mention that WP’s LGBTQ+ coverage is better.
This doesn’t ask your question, but this may be of useful to people, anyway.
I’ve just joined ground.news, a pay site. The great part about this site is that it rates news as to left, center, or right leaning, and rates the “factuality” of the sites. Filtering out non-factual knocks out a large part of the outlier’s lies, and shows who the people are, who push them. like knowing the players pushing their agenda. One caveat is that some that push lies still slide through by quoting the people who spout lies without disclaimers of the reliabilty of their false claims. One rule of thumb that I find helpful is that I mentally filter out any pleas to emotionalism. Manipulating readers/viewers emotionally is the opposite of informing. Sites that try to be centrist and ignore whether the sources are reliable about facts, end up being half lies or propagandsa. It is useful to keep in mind that blatently propaganda sites work in some truth to give themselves some plausibility. Only the highest reliable news are worth letting in to your news sphere.
This is a worldwide problem as paid propagandaists muddy the news sphere. Welcome to our cyber warfare world.
This is what I got: Some are more active than others.
- World News@beehaw.org
- News@lemmy.world
- United States | News & Politics@lemmy.ml
- World News & Analysis@lemmy.world
- World News@lemmy.ml
Thanks for the list
Some of those are exactly the places I’m talking about. Politics@lemmy.ml is filled with accounts from troll farms. The #4 post there right now is by the worst of the group.
And, if it wasn’t bad enough that post fake and misleading stuff, they brigade the votes and manipulate the posts that way as well. It’s a disaster.
So far for me, the only place in the fediverse with news and politics communities that are okay but not great are the ones on beehaw.org.
Everywhere else I’ve checked so far has a very naked agenda. Beehaw still leans left, but not in a way that feels icky.
You are quite literally the only person that actually answered OPs question. Thanks for these!
Where did you go on Reddit? The only place back there I really trusted was AskHistorians and 20 years ago is not really breaking news. Everywhere else I had to sort through crap for myself.
If you really want to understand the world, you’ll actually have to study it.Edit: It’s interesting I still got upvotes, since OP correctly points out that wasn’t well worded.
What I’m trying to say is that news with no bias is pretty much a unicorn, and one you can’t identify at a glance. And I don’t even mean just political bias, a lot of important stuff is boring or otherwise unsuitable for the news cycle. Adding a layer of social media people on top doesn’t automatically make it better.
What does that even mean? If I want to understand the world I need to study it?
Lol, wtf? I’m looking for current events. What level of prerequisite historical knowledge would I need where I could bipass what is happening right now all over the world?
And shit… All of Reddit is bad except askhistorians? What?
So, if I understand you correctly, your advice is that I shouldn’t trust news and I should study the world? What source should I use to study? Are all sources bias? I’m fucking confused
Clearly they’re saying you should hop in a hot air balloon and travel around the world spotting breaking news with your own eyes.
That would be lit, but my point was more like “news varies from deliberate lies to true but necessarily skewed content”. Reddit is a great way to get a mix of the whole spectrum with no context.
Honestly, this entire thread has been a bit of an eye opener for me
Oh wow hope you learned something!
Yeah, okay, in hindsight that wasn’t as elegant as I was hoping. More to come.
Edit:
This was about news in specific. Reddit’s great if you want help with your electronics project, but for political analysis it’s not so great. There’s way, waaay too many people pushing something or other for reasons other than empirical correctness.
AskHistorians is moderated extremely tightly by PhDs and requires a source for everything, so it’s about as good as it gets. I understand that’s not what you asked for, but it’s the closest thing I could think of. I’m honestly wondering what subreddit you were using for news - I feel like I’ve seen questionable discussion on all of them that I’ve encountered.
I also use things like r/UkrainianConflict for the latest news from that event - with the GIANT caveat that you have to understand the subject matter well enough to tell when OP is full of shit, or passing along shit. That one in particular is infested with people that think a nuclear first strike is a sane and justifiable tactic for NATO with no negative repercussions, which hopefully you can see is insane.
As for what you should study, pretty much all the social sciences help. If you can afford travel that’s great, but that’s not everyone and it’s possible to fuck that up too. Occasionally knowing other sciences will help; like when someone tells you the sun is causing climate change.
News reading is just figuring out your real situation in a world full of liars both deliberate and accidental. You either dissect the lies yourself or you have to find someone you trust. Random Redditors aren’t the right answer even if they can be part of the puzzle.
You should ask more questions and give less answers.
Oh, I ask plenty, too. Check my post history. I count 4 full posts in just the last month.
I’m sorry if I’m coming across as a know-it-all.
I don’t really use social media for that, to be honest. I just get info from my friends, but if I seek out news myself I’ll usually just check the BBC, free news that has to be as impartial as possible. Maybe the Financial Times is alright too, but they paywall their articles and they’re more intended for investors than the average person.
