Do you Google search and click on whatever news sources come up or do you look into the news sources leanings, news reporting quality, and credibility? Maybe just if you can vibe with it or not in general?
Simplified
Do you save a list of specific news sites? Or do you just click on anything just to read that specific story on a search engine?
Me personally: I have a set list of sites I check. I know that they are credible and trust worthy to the public, being non profits and them having high standards to news reporting. (some of them include Npr, and Ap news) Most of their news stories are intended to benefit the public. Of course they aren’t always perfect, but a solid choice, especially if you’re starting out on picking a specific news source.
How about you all?
I mostly cut out the live news cycle from my life. There’s really no benefit in keeping up with the immediacy of the live news cycle.
I still have the guardian news app just for the breaking news alerts in case of something major. The only reason I use this is that they tend to send the least number of bullshit notifications (e.g. no shit about British royal family drama).
I’m finding the news experience is much better when I catch a summary of the news story a few days later when the situation is better understood and developed. I get almost all my news from the TLDR news YouTube channel.
If you are going to use a news site, then I would suggest using it through an RSS reader app. That way the news comes through chronologically. If you do this, you get away from the bullshit prioritisation of stories on news websites.
IMO you’re doing it the right way.
If there’s a single indicator to pay attention to, it’s the source of funding. Where does the media outlet get its money from?
Next is professional ethics: does it employ real journalists? Journalism is like medicine, it’s a profession with a code of conduct. In this case, a commitment to factual accuracy, a good-faith search for the truth, fairness in choices about what to cover, transparency about sources, etc.
And if you feel the journalists are doing a bad job, then go back to point 1 and ask: Who is paying them? Are you? The reason for today’s crisis in journalism is not that journalists are lazy or evil, it’s that the internet cratered their business model. More of us need to step up and pay. It’s that simple.
I have a couple of paid subscriptions. If that’s the cost of living in a properly informed society, it’s a great deal.
I get all my news from memes.
And yay -Pw for arch linux news.
I read them all. I treat them like a prosecutor would treat witness testimony.
You read all of the news?
All the news I can.
AP is basically where the news gets its news, so I go there if I’m not looking for commentary or discussion.
Some comedy news programs have developed a level of journalistic integrity that frequently surpasses actual news outlets. John Oliver, the Daily Show, and Jon Stewart’s The Weekly Show podcast are really solid, not to mention much less hostile to sanity.
NPR has historically been king for getting me to feel like I actually understand an issue. I’ve been wary of them ever since whatever record-scratching both-sidesing it was they pulled during the 2016-2020 Trump American Soulrape Era that made me think nazi cock might have npr spit on it. I might look back into them again. They were good for a long time before that, it’s been awhile, and I haven’t heard about it continuing.
nazi cock might have npr spit on it
Ne’er shall I find poetry as eloquent in sentiment and imagination on this hallowed Internet. Good night.
I posted this in a different thread a while back. Here are some primary news sources:
- New York Times (NYT)
- Reuters
- Associated Press (AP)
- BBC News
- The Guardian
- Al Jazeera
- Bloomberg
- The Washington Post
- CNN
- Deutsche Welle (DW)
Waiting for room temperature IQs to start shrieking about CNN
They should give lite.cnn.com a try.
I get my news from Lemmy primarily.
Not a bad source actually since, you’re atleast getting mostly stories posted/shared by regular individuals and not a search engine algorithm throwing the same few sites all the time at you.
I use Lemmy as one of my secondary primary sources for news, while not my major, which happens to be a small handful of nonprofit ones. For tech news particularly, Lemmy users tend to do pretty good at sharing some good stories.
I use ground.news and only read from the sources marked High Factuality
ground news is really good.
My issue with ground news is it doesn’t give any weight to funding sources when making its’ bias ratings, which makes it easy for billionaire-funded media conglomerates with a “neutral and unbiased” front to fly under the radar.
Seconded. Been using it since early summer and it’s been great having instant access to bias and credibility data. Its also been nice to be able to easily read other perspectives on the same topic.
Getting different perspectives is very valuable for sure. You learn which inconvenient facts are left out by each side.
AllSides is a good one too
While I do have Ground News installed on my iPad, I only use it as a widget to let me know what’s going on. The sources it uses are generally not that great. Either the site is severely biased or the site is riddled with ads and pop ups. Basically every time I go to read an article it’s full of shit. I’ll give it credit as a substantial aggregator but it’s still pulling from sources that use click bait headlines. It’s not any better than social media.
Valid criticism. It’s good to get an idea of what’s going on in the media landscape. It’s not good as a high quality source.
If I don’t see it on Lemmy, my parents usually let me know.
No don’t worry they are progressives so it’s almost always NPR or local.
How do you decide on which news sources to read?
If a news outlet has indicated to me that they care more about ad revenue than reporting news, I avoid them.
If the only way an outlet feels they can get readership is with use of clickbait headlines, I avoid them.
If the headline is something like “you’ll never guess why ___ hates this” or “the reason you can’t blahblahblah” or some other salacious bullshit or they have a super cringe thumbnail on their YT video, I avoid them.
If a writer misconstrues the words of a celebrity or political leader for their own narrative, I avoid them.
If their bias prevents them from reporting the facts of an event, I avoid them.
“Avoid” does not mean never visit. It means I try not to and if I do I proceed with caution and skepticism with the intent to get another source.If I’m searching for a news story, it’s probably because I came across it on social media (Lemmy) or a blog and want to get credible information. Or because someone here is quoting a story and I have a hunch they’re misinformed. I use DuckDuckGo and generally get decent reputable results at the top. At its face, I will never trust Google for fact checking. If I end up at a wiki page, I often check their sources.
I have an extensive list of reputable and/or diverse outlets in my RSS reader. The only “mainstream” American sources are NYT, AP, NPR, and Reuters. I’ve been using BigNews as my RSS reader for a year or so now. I really like its simple interface and ability to subscribe to newsletters. Newsletters are sometimes the best way to get a blurb off the news without subscribing to something like NYT. If I’m compelled enough, I’ll run a paywalled article through archive.is.
I don’t feel that people publishing on substack or medium, etc are reputable outlets for general news. That’s great for specific topics, opinions, and focused reporting.
The only news I pay for is my local newspaper. In addition to local reporting, they curate AP articles.
Mostly Reuters as I feel news wires are inherently more likely to report just the facts as their main customers are other news outlets. This provides an incentive towards accuracy in a way that I find the current news landscape does not have. Beyond that I have a handful of podcasts and other more niche publications I love like Ars Technica.
You can reliably quickly tell if a news source is credible depending on how many appeals to emotion and superfluous adjectives/descriptors are found in their articles.
A lot of it is about parsing multiple sources, and extrapolating the data from the spin.
Seems like a lot of news stories quote AP news so I just read from the source.
Never just one source, ever. For specific resources, newswires can be more or less good. I’ll often also use some sort of news aggregators like news.google.com as well as forums like Mbin and Lemmy to initially hear about things - if I want to go digging them I start checking out different resources.
