I’m looking for a good unbiased source of world news. Ruling out CBC (Canadian news more concerned with internal politics than world events), and CNN (the American propoganda station), the best one I have found to date was the BBC website, but even that seems to be degrading.
Suggestions?
The BBC World Service (radio) is probably about as close as you can get.
Just look at news from as many sources as you can, ideally ones that contradict each other.
As an aside, I had a conversation/debate/argument with an Israeli friend about this very issue (well, more about the role of news media as an editorial versus data feed - basically, your CNN vs. straight AP wire). His opinion was much more towards an editorial method stressing the backgrounds etc, while I supported a more bare-bones news source allowing the reader/viewer to research their own opinion (I granted the fact that my POV is fairly limited in that it relies on the person doing research, which ain’t gonna happen). Of course, he had a very different viewpoint on expectations from the media. In the end, I generally concluded that media is going to editorialize in one way or another, and the best you can do is look at multiple sources and keep an open mind.
I guess there’s no such thing as an English language feed of Al Jazeera?..
Media without editorilizing would be an unending flood of useless information. How would the media decide what to report locally, nationally, internationally? Everything the media says to us has a meaning within a political and cultural context, and its part of a larger message that someone is interested in portraying.
For example, why does the media report a school shooting nationally? Most of the nation won’t know anyone who knows anyone involved, so whats the story? The story is about guns and schools and the disenfranchisment of our nations youth - which are national political issues.
If a media source isn’t coming from “somewhere” they have no way of determining what it is they should use their precious media space to say to the public.
Of course they could just go for the largest market, but then we’d have another “world’s greatest police car crashes” or something.
I don’t think there is an unbiased way to report a lot of these stories. Either its going to be meaningless, or you are going to have to try to tie it to a larger political context.
Read as many articles as possible. http://www.newsnow.co.uk provides links to a huge number of English-language news sources, which you can select by subject.
I second the BBC recommendation, though even that is accused of anti-Israeli bias by some people on these boards.
The process of selecting information to be broadcast/printed/posted to the web inherently involves some bias. There is no way it cannot.
Ultimately, a human being has to find out the information and then another human being has to decide whether it’s worthwhile to tell anyone.
Until we develop news-gathering robots that scour every part of the globe, you have to expect some bias.
http://news.google.com is the current best page I have found for reading masses of sources. I have newswire access at work, but we don’t have PA unfortunately, yet I find Google News provides almost up to the minute sources for the PA wire. Because Google syndicates so many papers worldwide, it does come across as a whole as “unbiased” - though of course it has no real editorial line of its own, and some of its sources are biased, it’s just that taken as a whole it’s a pretty broad and fair picture of world events.
In terms of unbiasedness - and this is NOT because I am British, in my (unbiased) view as a journalist who sees thousands of different news things a week - http://news.bbc.co.uk is by far the most accurate and least unbiased, of the sources I am aware of. Taken as a whole I really do find it unbiased, and I can also see how the BBC journalists are really making an effort to be impartial and report both sides of a story.
BBC news is sometimes less appealing than other sources because it comes across as rather “dry” - I think this is as a result of them making such a huge (and commendable) effort to stick to the facts in an impartial manner, and not bias or sensationalise their reporting.
Here’s a half-remembered quote. It came from a BBC radio manager during WWII, after receiving a complaint from a woman about biased news stories. “I’m happy to report, madam, that every one of our reporters is biased.”
(I don’t get any google hits on this, so I’m probably not remembering it exactly.)
The BBC does tend to get highly recommended (Particularly the World Service)
Think i’ve mentioned it before here - Gorbachev (after the final collapse of the USSR) publicly stated that when things began to get tough the only news source he’d trust was the BBC.
I thought you were after an unbiased source.
I’d have to add another voice for the BBC. They usually do a pretty good job.
I don’t think it’s possible to get a completely unbiased picture from any one source. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though. Heaven knows I wouldn’t be one.
RR
Another vote for the B B C.
I suggest whenever you want to get the picture about some international topic. Do the following.
Visit 2 websites of two newspapers in one camp(country).
Visit 2 websites of newspapers of the other country.
And finally, 2 of a neutral.detached 3rd country.
Then, form your opinion.
Oh, don’t take the above advice literally.
You took that out of context. What I meant was looking at Al Jazeera in addition to CNN (extreme bias examples), and assuming that the actual news lies somewhere in between…
Gotcha. Thanks for clearing that up. I was a little puzzled there for a while.
RR
So what’s an unbiased source now?
The last post was before the war in Iraq started (or is that the liberation or the invasion?).
I was going to post an new OP, but a search turned up this relative thread.
I’m under the impression that every news source has to give it’s readers something they want to buy/read. Who just hired Peter Arnett?
If newspaper A reports the strict pro-Bush line of “this is good” and newspaper B reports the anti-Bush/anti-war (and whoever else, I know. And is there anti-Bush/pro-war news sources–or is it mostly anti-Bush?) that “this is bad”, I feel their sales and editorials are affected by their stance.
Most of the world doesn’t seem to believe US reporting–being a tool of Bush’s goverment, and even some of the BBC. But, it seems to me that they easily believe any other source of news that is non-anglo, not matter what the source. And disbelieve, out of hand, any anglo-source reporting.
Al-Jezeera, while it may be the first step in providing independent (as opposed to State-run) reporting in the Middle East, fails the test of being unbiased, IMHO. It seems unabashedly anti-US/Anglo. Maybe they have good reason to not believe western spin.
But facts are facts.
But where can one find facts? Unbiased by those the report them?
Because, if one can’t verify facts for oneself, there is always doubt about those facts.
But I would say the anglo sources (the US/and BBC, but I’m not familiar with the BBC right to freedom of the press) have a right to the freedom of the press. Which may not apply for other news sources.
Am I to believe Iraqi propoganda over the US’s?
Sometimes reporters inject their personal opinions/political beliefs into their reports
Facts are facts, but what we see on the news is the SPIN. Isn’t it?
A car bomb that kills US soldiers and the Iraqis is either a: terrorist attack OR a maytrdom operation. That same event is two sides of a coin. (I have problems with maytrdom, but that’s a cultural thing, I guess).
Hasn’t Al-Jezeera reported as fact that all the Jews that worked in the Twin Towers skipped worked on 9/11 and that any chemical weapons found by the US are CIA plants? Is that objective news desemination?
Peer reviewed scientific journals provide an example of fact reporting.
But this won’t work for breaking news by definition.
So, if I hear news about Iraq, where should I go for a totally unbiased report?
And if the BBC is anglo-biased/Arab antagonostic.
What then?