It seems that whichever place I go to get news it has a conservative or liberal bias. Even though I lean to the right I’d really like to get my news in as balanced a version as is humanly possible.
I do realize that it’s almost impossible for news to be absolutely neutral. Even selection of what stories to report involves some bias. But what is the closest thing to the ideal on the net? I really do not want to live in a bubble, of whatever complexion.
You’ll never find a publication that most people consider neutral. The best you can do is find one that liberals accuse of being conservative and conservatives accuse of being liberal, and hope both sides are right.
The closest thing I have found to a neutral site for US news is the BBC. I’m sure it’s not truly neutral, but it generally lacks the partisan spin that pollutes most US-based sites. I’m curious to know what you think of it.
The BBC news website is vastly more neutral than what they say on TV.
Some folks would disagree, but I’d say NPR news is actually fairly balanced. Some of their entertainment programming is definitely slanted left though.
I find ChannelNewsAsia refreshing whenever I’m fed up with the NAmerican/European centric view.
This is what I came in to say. I think the news web site they have is a very good source for news and isn’t biased hugely.
By the way, I really did find CNN’s web site to be really neutral. However, and I guess part of this is my opinion, Trump has been berating them heavily and it would be easy to interpret their coverage now as “anti-Trump”. However, I don’t think they were anti-Obama, anti-Bush, or anti-Clinton, etc. Trump really has been hammering them as fake news.
They look way more liberal now, but I think that they are generally the middle ground in cable news.
I am a subscriber to The Week magazine. In their articles they consistently provide perspectives from all sides, quoting both liberal and conservative writers/reporters.
Here is a link to their online version. I assume it contains the same style of content.
My first news page I open up in the morning is Reuters. One thing I like about that agency is that they don’t pounce on every little “story” as it comes up and immediately post something about it. That helps separate some of the chaff from the actual meat (to mix metaphors).
If you are not a regular reader of news, The Week is a very good magazine to get. Does a bang-up job summarizing what was being said, and looks at some very non-traditional sources to do that. However, their online website tends to have some very biased commentary, which is not always distinguished from “news” (a problem found on many a “news” site these days).
There are no neutral news sources, though some are a lot better than others.
I read several sources across the spectrum. Usually a particular source is good on some topics, and not so good on others. But if you read a selection of different sources, you’ll get a good picture and be able to make up your own mind.
Are you looking for news as a description of what has happened or “news” as commentary on what may or may not have happened?
C-span
If you live in a northern tier state, check out the Canadian news. Yes, they have their own biases, but it is very interesting getting an outside perspective.
I would also recommend Fareed Zakaria if you like intelligent, erudite, non-partisan analysis. He has views, but has voted for both Republican and Democratic Presidents and is very far from being a hack-partisan guy. He also is just really smart and articulate.
Here is an article entitled, “Sorry, Mr. Trump, I agree with you.” that is not too shabby.
And if that looks in any way conservative, here is his final article where he lays out why he was voting for Hillary Clinton without really being a supporter of hers. His views in this article were really similar to mine and hardly “hack partisan” like so many others.
Note: I can’t find his article on the election. It was called, “Your views on Clinton are irrelevant. Trump is not normal” or something like that. Anyone?
I generally find myself in agreement with this chart as to where news organizations fall on the reliability/liberal/conservative scales.
I realize a lot of this is opinion, but anything that shows the NY Times, WaPost, CNN, ABC and NBC as unbiased is way off the mark. They are all liberally biased, often blatantly so.
I will look at NPR’s news site. Given their government funding and radio programming, I am a bit skeptical, but I’ll give it a shot.
For the OP, here is a website I found while trying to find neutral news sources:
Any chart that lists NPR as non-partisan and meeting high standards is totally unreliable.
I have never found a source without bias. I think the trick is to read enough sources to figure out the biases and then take that into account when reading their take on the news.
All news organisations have their biases. And different parts of the same organisation can have different biases. So read more than one and make sure you read ones of differing viewpoints.
Hmm… something I touched on earlier WRT the BBC, but I’ve also seen it elsewhere is that to me, TV news seems much more biased than papers and text articles. Does that chime with you?