The 24/7 cable news channels are, IMHO, 90% commentary, not news.
I don’t get the local newspaper anymore.
Where do you get neutral news? I do like the legacy network news shows abc/nbc/cbs nightly news but I am rarely home to watch them.
Do the cable channels have real news at certain times?
Listen to NPR on the radio or read the NY Times, Washington Post, or the WSJ. Avoid all of the op-ed pages to avoid left-wing or right-wing cooties.
Associated Press is still pretty good at just straightforward reporting. I know NPR is considered liberal but I honestly think they do a good job at reporting too. I also like Reuters.
There is always bias in any reporting.
Seconding mentions of the AP, NPR, and Washington Post for hard news.
In addition, BBC News is, IMO, pretty neutral, though they aren’t particularly US-focused. I read the news on their web site and app, and they also have a cable channel, BBC World News, that is on a lot of cable systems in the U.S.
A couple of months ago, WGN America launched a nightly news broadcast called NewsNation, with the stated intent of being a national news program without an opinion or bias. It’s a three-hour broadcast, running during all of prime time (8pm-11pm Eastern). If WGN America is on your cable system, you may want to check that out, too.
There’s no such thing as news without bias.
I do find allsides.com useful to check what bias a news outlet has. And as they point out, the center doesn’t mean a lack of bias. You should look at sites across a spectrum, not just confine yourself to sites that match your own bias.
I disagree with this. If you read the NY Times, the Washington Post, or listen to NPR, you’ll get pretty much all the news you need, and as accurate as they can make it. If they make mistakes, they publish obvious corrections. There’s no reason to survey the web and try to separate the wheat from the chaff – there’s too much chaff.
I won’t look at sites that are inaccurate. I’m not saying you need to take in some “chaff” for balance. My spectrum runs primarily from the center to the Left, due to accuracy concerns.
But bias includes what gets covered, as well as how things are covered. So, no, reading just one or two sources is not enough, in my view.
BBC, AP, NPR, NYT, WaPo.
There is no way to get unbiased news on television, it is all very biased and it is a bad medium for news anyway. AP and Reuters are the best for being unbiased. There are lots of websites with people who know things so you can bypass journalists. I like to get the headlines from the wire services or newspaper websites and then go in depth on things that interest me on experts’ websites.
Christiane Amanpour: “Truthful, not neutral. There’s a difference here: truthful is bringing the truth, neutral can be creating a false equivalence.”
CNN and its imitator “24 Hour News Networks” are built for one thing: to report breaking news around the clock. The problem is that there just isn’t breaking news every hour of the day. CNN came to the forefront with the First Gulf War, embedding journalists and reporting on every event that occurred, complete with graphics and interviews with everyone from Norman Schwartzkopf down to a lowly Marine private on shit-burning duty, and they learned to build up the tension during Desert Shield and make every single thing as monumental as possible in Desert Storm for a combat operation that lasted all of six weeks, and most of it mopping up after the utter collapse of the Republican Guard.
CNN doubled down on this with the September 11, 2001 attacks and started populating its coverage with roundtables of supposed expert commentators to fill up air time in the absence of any actual news to report while its imitators like MSNBC and Bloomberg followed the same model. Fox News, on the other hand, tries to look like a 24 hours news network while actually being a propaganda machine (and quite an effective one) for Rupert Murdoch and his friends.
John Stewart, of course, has had a few things to say about CNN that are worth hearing:
If you want actual “truthful, but not neutral” news, there are sources if you pick through the buffet. PBS NewsHour is quite good at cutting through the chaff; Amanpour & Co. is largely analysis and opinion but focuses on depth over flash. VICE News and Vox don’t hide their liberal leanings but cover a lot of issues and topics that don’t get wide coverage in the normal press. And The Daily Show has long been a primary news source for the under 50 crowd because while it is sardonic and diverting, it also cuts straight through the bullshit that 24 hour cable news tries to make a story out of.
The “legacy network news shows abc/nbc/cbs” are now readily available online, and are of course as superficial as they always were. I’d get more out of skimming The Washington Post for ten minutes than a half hour spent watching The CBS Evening News.
Stranger
Seriously, if all you did was listen to NPR (Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, All Things Considered), you’ll be very informed on any issues that really matter. Your local station will also have the local news, right after the national news at the top of the hour.
ETA: And, listen to Marketplace as well, for financial news.
Except for the fact that they have a bias as well. The founder and CEO worked for the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush, and even Mitch McConnell. Not where I first turn for unbiased journalism. Maybe Rupert Murdoch will start a cable channel call Fair and Balanced News, to counteract the bias that exists in television. If that’s not catchy, perhaps he could use an animal name instead. Animals are unbiased.
USA news is so USA centric that our view is distorted of what happens in the world. Our outlets cover Washington. Overall that’s pretty easy and I think it might be overall cheap to do, too, in the grand scale of things. But I’m ignorant on the costs
A lot of Washington news is handout, with a new top put on it to make the reporter look knowledgeable. Still, I have my favorite, I lean toward CBS, but the morning has gotten weak. I avoid ABC since it turned into a Disney promotion. NBC does ok, but with too much pap. I do spend some time there off and on. PBS? Eh? Sometimes. No Fox.
I go to learn about the world from what looks like the best: Aljazeera, which I get on Roku. We are actually told there what is happening around the world, and with a pretty centrist look and with decent depth for a broadcaster. The network looks at the USA in surprisingly adequate depth. And the rest of the world also. Very commendable coverage. I suggest Aljazeera didn’t make it in the USA because of the Muslim-sounding name. Who knows? That only my guess, and it unimportant, really.
For my reading, I’m center to center-left, I think, it’s the NYTimes and Washington Post. I follow a couple sane columnists and truly enjoy the health, medical, science, technology coverage. With these two, and a little Christian Science Monitor when I have time, I think I get somewhat of a picture.
As I look at this, it’s a wonder I have time for anything else other than news. And, yes, there are days I just stay away.
I do listen to NPR, and I find them to be fairly professional. But the liberal bias does bother me sometimes.
Fox News is way too conservative for my taste.
Ah, I did not know that. I don’t go to them for news. I find that I agree with their bias assessments, to the extent that I’m familiar with the sources. And again, all sources are biased. I avoid sources that are inaccurate/unreliable, not ones that are biased, because that would be all of them.
I don’t think they’re horribly biased, but they definitely have slightly right-leaning blinders on in their ratings. In fact, my favorite thing about Allsides is this page where they describe a particular news source as right-leaning.
That news source? John Gable, CEO and Founder of Allsides.
Modding: Not a Debate, but asking for opinions mostly so off to IMHO with the thread.
I’m not sure that over the last year or so the Washington post could be counted as completely unbiased. Note that I say this as a dead tree Washington post subscriber and Trump hater. But in recent days I noticed that in choice of wording of news headlines and in some cases story bodies it was clear that they put their thumb on the scale against him. However I forgive them since it was objectively clear that he was a danger to democracy and so it was their patriotic duty to see that he not be re-elected. I suspect that now that he is out of the picture they will go back to their more neutral standards.
NPR is probably a bit more balanced. The news shows Morning edition and all things considered follow the facts as far as where the news goes, but maybe on the left of Americas center on cultural issues. For example take it as a given that gays being married is a good thing.
I’d also add that not all public radio syndicated nationally is NPR, and there are some very left leaning shows out there. My favorite is “On the Media” which is a great show but directly came out and said that Trump was destroying America
I 3rd, 4th and 5th all of these.
I find that BBC gives a good counterweight to the Federal government focus of the Washington Post, for instance and I have been very pleasantly surprised at the breadth and depth of the coverage by the NYT-not too much big apple blinders at all. The NYT is the only one I pay for and it is worth it.
Your local cable company might provide an answer. Cable companies often have a bare bones news channel of their own that runs a half-hour or an hour news broadcast that runs on a loop, split between national and local news. Where I live now, it’s Spectrum News of Central New York. When I lived in New York City, it was the excellent New York One. Almost no analysis or interpretation: “The President gave a speech today on…”