Between CNN’s infotainment fluff and Fox News’s right-wing nuttery, it doesn’t feel like there’s any place I can go for, ya know, what they used to call “journalism.” (Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer saddened me, in that he was doing the job that REAL journalists should be doing.)
Anyway, is there an online news source that you find to be reasonably bullshit-free, unbiased, and intelligent? nytimes.com is the closest to a trusted source, but surely there’s others.
I subscribe to the Economist. There are some articles that are subscriber-only, but I think it’s mostly free now.
I don’t listen to it enough to have an opinion, no where close to enough time spent listening to it. But I can ask the question for future posts:
What do we think of NPR for news?
I like NPR. When I’m in the car, I end up getting a decent amount of news and stuff from them.
I access a variety and then make try to draw conclusions. I like BBC, NY Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly, but I think the magazine the Week does an amazing job at compiling competing view points for me.
www.bloomberg.com is the best unbiased news out there. Of course, it slants everything from a busness point of view but not biased per say toward any ideology.
Take a look. It’s free
happywaffle writes:
> Between CNN’s infotainment fluff and Fox News’s right-wing nuttery, it doesn’t
> feel like there’s any place I can go for, ya know, what they used to
> call “journalism.” (Jon Stewart’s interview with Jim Cramer saddened me, in that
> he was doing the job that REAL journalists should be doing.)
Well, first of all, if you really want to understand the news, you’re going to have to actually read something instead of just listening to things. Previous posters have already mentioned a number of print sources for good news. I notice that the TV sources you mention above aren’t even regular news programs but are either headline news or comedy. Do you have so little time that you can’t watch an entire half-hour program? The network news on TV would be better than that.
NPR is pretty good for a radio news show. My only problem with them is their habit of doing so many whimsical pseudo-news stories. It’s a higher class of fluff than other news outlets, but it’s still fluff.
Al Jazeera is a great source of world news stories, many of which go under the radar of Western-centric outlets.
NPR fan here.
I’ve long felt that NPR / PBS are the best major news sources out there. No sound byte journalism - they actually spend time developing and explaining the news.
But NPR definitely has a liberal bias both in terms of the stories it covers and the slant it gives to them.
Bias is inevitable. I like both Fox News and Pacifica Radio, both from the far ends of the spectrum.
I get the most comprehensive and unbiased news from The Week, a weekly news magazine.
And if you prefer electronic, they have an online site: The Week
What makes them relatively unbiased is that instead of writing an article on say, AIGs bonuses, they create an article composed of what other people are writing about the topic. And they try to present opposing viewpoints, so they’ll quote from newspapers and magazines and blogs that represent opposite ends of the political spectrum. For the main news items, it is almost like having a news clipping service.
Here is one example. http://www.theweek.com/article/index/94319/Renaming_enemy_combatants
But I would not claim that they are completely unbiased because they do have regular columnists in addition to summarizing other news sources.
If by unbiased, you mean middle of the road, neither right or left, I don’t think you can find it. At least I can’t. So posters that advocate going to the “BBC, NY Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic Monthly,” - all liberal news sources - are missing your point I believe.
I suggest that you read a paper. Not a blog, or the internet, but the damn newspaper. There is no substitute for actually reading the news. It’s much more in-depth than TV or radio.
Then I think you have to read opposing viewpoints and figure it out for yourself. Here in DC I read the Washington Post (very liberal) and the Washington Times (very conservative). They both cover the same issues and see can see both sides of that issue and the arguments. You can usually find the same type of thing in your area.
Is this easy. Nope. But being smart and informed isn’t.
At one point I regularly listened to the BBC World Service on shortwave. It was amazing the difference in coverage compared to the US news media. They would lead with stories that weren’t even mentioned on the US network news. Bias isn’t just about left vs right, but also about what news is considered important.
Generally click on Foxnews and CNN. I also click on a couple of local papers like the Star Ledger or central Jersey’s courier news for local stories when I don’t get a chance to read the paper. And of course Fark.
The Economist is a bit wingnut about US politics, which makes me wonder about its slant in other issues I’m not as knowledgeable about, but it’s certainly very informative. The BBC website is my news site of choice.
Seconded. Best newspaper published.
BTW. Tracy, loved your early work.
My mom. She would never lie to me and knows all. 
Also NPR, Time (sometimes) and I’ve gotten into the habit of watching BBC America. I’m not sure how it’s different from regular BBC though.
BBC has it’s own rather significant bias issues.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1942948.ece