charizard: You’ll have to connect the dots for me, here. Bias would enter from that, because…
For-profit news companies, like all other companies, have to think of their consumers and their advertisers. Stories that would make the company’s marketing department break out in hives are automatically at a disadvantage when it comes to selecting what to publish.
Ok, this red herring has to stop. The simple fact is that this is not true. A broadcast company is not tied to the revenue it gets from one particular advertiser. They know perfectly well that stories which make a particular advertiser itch get higher ratings. Thus allowing them to get other advertisers.
The free market what a concept!
I had a friend that worked for the local independent station as a producer for the morning news/entertainment program (like a local “Today” show). The station was later consumed by News Corp (Fox). The directives for quantity changed but content didn’t.
There’s no such thing as bias-free news. There can’t be. Bias isn’t just the headline, it’s the subtle flavoring of what gets left in and what gets left out. It’s the selection of adjectives. It’s in who is chosen for interviews. All you can do is choose multiple sources with well-known and well-understood biases and distill what you get.
I wrote an article once for a Web site I was editing. It described how the actions of a couple of well-known national political figures affected the subject matter of the Web site. Four members of the oversight committee emailed me within hours of its posting. Two were complaining that I allowed my right-wing bias to show in the article. The other two were complaining that I allowed my left-wing bias to show. I figured that meant it was appropriately balanced. I managed to annoy both sides equally, and nobody knew where I really stood on the issue.
All four of them demanded the article be taken down. I said no, I’m the editor and it’s my call. They said take it down or get fired. I quit. My successor took down the article.
I’ve always thought of the British news sources as more serious… but even when you check out FoxNews, CNN and other that are supposed to be biased… you can more or less weed out the facts. Reading several sources helps too. Remembering we have our own biases too…
Due to the demand of putting news online as fast as you can its pretty common in the internet to see facts rich content without too much bias added.
I agree with John that the GD in SMDB are a great source to filter rubbish… whenever I see news to hard to beleive I know its being attacked, analyzed and explained in here. 
An excellent, if somewhat dated, look at bias in the newsmedia can be found in Martin Lee’s book, Unreliable Sources.
You don’t need to have someone from the head office constantly looking over a news outlet’s shoulder in order to ensure spin. It can be done bysimply structuring the operation so that bias is built right in.
You might call your paper to complain if the Business section were missing, because it would be obvious that a mistake has been made. But we don’t seem to notice that there’s never a Labor section.
Also, stories have been known to com e from fewer sources than you might think. A paper will sometimes take an AP story, have a reporter change a few words, and place the local guy’s byline under the title.
You also must remember the “Golden Age” of the unbiased journalism of yore is largely a myth. Media outlets are organs of the owner’s wishes, whether that’s a private individual or a corporation. And don’t forget that most media runs on ad revenue. How is it that there is always more news to report on a Sunday than any other day of the week? We’ve all seen stuff in newspapers and magazines that look and read like articles but are marked “Special Advertising Section”. Did you know that the same thing happens on television news without the disclaimer?
The only way to get unfiltered information would be to be there yourself, or place cameras everywhere. Look at what’s available, but always be aware of who paid for it to be in front of you and think about why.
Even better, get outa yer house and talk to people.
I recall when my eyes were first opened to media bias. It was the mid-80s, and some people protesting a certain company by lying on the tracks the trains used to come in and out of their plant were hit by a train. Someone was there with a camera and you saw a guy’s legs getting chopped off by the wheels.
The way it was presented on the news, it more or less looked like these people had got it into their heads that if they just plunked themselves down, they could force the train to stop on a dime, in violation of any reasoable expecations of the physics at play. They came off looking like a bunch of stupid kooks.
I mentioned this to the people I was interning with at the time, a politically-oriented theater group. Not only had they already heard about it, it turns out they actually knew the organizers of the protest, who had made their protest plans very plain to the company in the days and weeks leading up to that day. It became quite clear to me that a freight train had deliberately been sent down some tracks where the company knew people would be on the tracks, which gives the whole incident a different look.
Unfortunately, 18 years has erased enough details (name, place, etc.) that I have been unable to formulate a fruitfull Google search string.
Oh, right! We forgot the magical mantra “free market”. One need only utter it and all problems disappear!
As another example of this, you will find that about every 10th customer who calls the marketting department at the network is told to “fuck off and die”. The employee who does this does not get fired by the network; in fact, they get promoted because they have explained to the network management that due to the wonders of the free market, they can randomly piss off a few particular advertisers / potential advertisers…There are always more where they came from!
Oh, and the networks are particularly excited to cover stories about people advocating for a less materialist lifestyle (like “Buy Nothing” day) because that way they can piss off lots of advertisers at once.
No, I’m certain I did not claim this. I may have implied that this is an instance where it works to an advantage.
What!? I’m usually the one to rant this way at you. You shock me by turning it around.
NYT about adblockers new ad campaign
Here’s another story about it in INC.com of all places.
wired.com about the day itself.
Here’s a story from MSNMoney. In the UK.
Here is their FAQ if anyone is interested.
There don’t seem to be too many main stream media stories about this. But unless you can show that it is more than a few cooks over the internet that may not be proof of much. I seem to find much more about it in England and Canada. Have you participated in an event here in America?
I agree entirely with this. If you look for the bias and are willing to sort out the information from it, you can usually pick up the relevant facts.
I also find the BBC to be an interesting perspective. The first time I heard them call the Democratic Party the “ruling” party (They held congress at the time) it struck me as a very odd phrase to use. I also like the way they don’t have bumper music on the radio.
Here’s an interesting article on the right wing bias of Google’s automated headline generation system.
And the name you gave that link is a perfect example of bias. Did you actually read the article you linked to?
If positive stories are more likely to have the term “Kerry” in the headline and negative ones are more likely to have the term “John Kerry,” then is Google biased because a news search for “John Kerry” brings up more negative stories? Sheesh!
The whole concept of matching column-inches to assure fairness of reporting is silly. If Kerry takes the day off to spend with his family, and Bush makes four public speeches, signs some bills, vetos some bills, and wins a thumb-wrestling match with Paul Edgar Philippe Martin, should they get equal amounts of coverage in the news that day?
I sure did! That’s why I provided the link. Automated bias on the basis of how articles refer to a person is an interesting and unexpected phenomena. The fact that it may have an innocent explanation is irrelevant to whether the bias exists or not.
Do you deny that, as my link showed, Google news has a right wing bias? If not, your comment is nothing but a pc kneejerk. There’s nothing biased about calling a spade a spade. If you do deny Google’s bias, you are delusional. Which is it?
The most interesting thing about that article was the semi-confession by conservative writers that they deliberately “game the (Google) system” to give themselves more hits.
Nope, but you can get reasonably close through a couple big, respected, opposing sources.
I read the front sections of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal every morning, and Science Times every Tuesday. It takes about 15 minutes. For “What the heck just happened” stories, I go to cnn.com because it puts stuff up so fast there’s no time for anything but a simple statement of the facts as they were known at that time.
I do not deny that If you search for “John Kerry” in Google News, you get biased results. On the other hand, if you search for “Kerry” it’s pretty balanced.
That’s a very different thing from saying that Google News has a right-wing bias. There was no evidence presented at all (or even any speculation) that there’s any other right-wing (or any other kind of -wing) bias to any other search on Google News.
All a search engine does is return results based on a formula.
I’m a little surprised you don’t see the connection.
We’re not talking about a free market in apples, for example. An inefficient apple company will probalby go out of business. However a right-wing newspaper has a clear share of the market to aim at, and cannot possibly be disturbed by any left-wing newspaper.
Consider media income advertising. Why would the media automatically run a story that annoys a big contributor?
Consider an owner with a political agenda. Of course it’s worth running only stories that support his viewpoint. He’s not out to maximise his income - he wants the influence.
What the buying public wants largely consists of ‘sexy’ simplified stories. (Why do you think political adverts are so short and largely consist of slogans?)
Also how does the buying public know the story is slanted?
I was a producer for six years and it never happened to me either. This idea is generally what folks on the left would like to believe is how a newsroom owned by a large corporation operates.
As an individual, I tried to put on the best product possible to appeal to the most people. It’s a given that about fifty percent of the public will disagree with your political position, so you have to be fair and stick to the facts. Unfortunately, some people are not able to do that. I’m curious, Barbarian…what do you produce?
…Fluffy, innocent, non-corporate-threatening pieces that didn’t bother to attract any attention from the Powers That Be?
As I’ve said before, just because you never attracted any “unwanted attention” doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
<AHEM!> Back to the original question.
I was googling for sites last week which link to news sites worldwide when a video site crashed me. I’d bookmarked several, and looked up a few more before I decided that the OP can use one or more of these, or do his/her own googling.
DailyEarth News Directory
Flying Inkpot’s World News Links
News and Newspapers Online
NewsLink
NewsVoyager.com
NEWSTRAN Free Newspaper: Translate World News Online News Translation This is a truncated title, honest. :smack:
OneWorld.net
Thousands of newspapers on the Net
Yahoo! Directory Newspapers
AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgh.
I got so caught up in making sure I had the links in without messing up that I forgot to say: I agree with others who suggest using an assortment of sources. I agree with whoever suggested Christian Science Monitor. I useta subscribe to it, back when I could afford it. They try very hard to be neutral.
IIRC, someone else also suggested The Economist, with which I also agree. If I could afford it, I’d get it, too. Unfortunately, CSM isn’t cheap, and the last I knew, it cost ~$100 for an Economist subscription here in the U.S. (it’s a British publication); could be more now. Worth it, if you’re serious about news. Think of it as Time or Newsweek, but without - as a British friend put it - “whose dog Madonna has bitten this week,” OWTTE (you can tell how fond he isn’t of entertainment news). 
When I lived in/near Detroit, I would tune in to the CBC newscasts (Windsor, ON). You’ll never know how much the Canadian viewpoint varies from “Stateside” at times until you’ve tried it. And they have some other interesting programming, eh? That’s another thing I’m homesick for. The nice thing about it is that almost anywhere along “the world’s longest unguarded border” (is it relatively unguarded, or even called that anymore? At least it’s the world’s longest friendly border! Yay, Canada!) is that you are in reach of Canadian radio and TV stations, and thus in reach of news which often has a different slant.