
Ask HN: Where do you go to read or watch neutral and unbiased news? - nullspace
I guess answers will vary depending on where you are from, but where do you go to read or watch unbiased international news?
======
alasdair_
The Economist has a free-market bias that they openly admit, but they tend to
be good at distinguishing opinion from facts and take several steps (such as
making the journalists anonymous) to help minimize influence. Also, it was
good enough for Karl Marx - hardly a free-market champion.

The Hill is surprisingly good for DC politics news.

The English version of Al Jazeera is Saudi-funded but usually covers stories
fairly. (The arabic version is outright propaganda and should be avoided).

Vice News is pretty good. They have a new HBO show coming out.

The Intercept tends to get its facts right and sources them well. It's pro-
Snowden and pro-Wikileaks but I haven't noticed any egregious slanting of the
truth, or outright lies so far.

Even CNN (really!) has a couple of "real" journalists left working for them.
The only one that seems to have enough clout to avoid editorial meddling is
Fareed Zakaria (GPS).

John Oliver is biased, especially in terms of pro-Clinton content but his
facts are usually correct. He's also funny.

Le Monde Diplomatique (French newspaper) used to be very good but I haven't
read it in some time.

The BBC is generally accurate (and I give them props for funding an undercover
investigation of their own director!) but I'd generally ignore it for hot-
button UK-based political issues. It's one of the few sources that are
legally-bound to be impartial however so they generally don't get TOO
egregious.

The WSJ is still excellent for business news. Similarly the Financial Times in
the UK. I'd largely ignore anything else they print however.

For the rest: I suggest just reading a story and then going straight to the
source material to see how trustworthy it is. Any story that simply references
another news outlet can be ignored - keep digging until you get to the actual
sources then ask yourself if they are credible.

~~~
sycril
I decided to finally make an account because some of the sources that you
listed are not only biased but outright wrong.

Al Jazeera is actually funded by Qatar, and you can read about the issues that
they have here
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_controversies_and_criticism)
. This includes the English version.

You can't call CNN unbiased just because one reported has so far been good.

In every subject that John Oliver reported on that I knew a bit about, I had
to stop due to the amount of fallacies. For example, in one of the most recent
ones, he jokes about how police worry about people armed with knives. He then
shows a clip of a police officer explaining why knives are dangerous, but cuts
him off in order to laugh at how stupid he is. Let me explain as a former
soldier exactly why criminals with knives are dangerous. While in striking
distance (an arms length) it takes someone with a knife in his hand a fraction
of a second to cause damage. Whereas it can take a trained soldier (I assume
police as well) to draw, cock, aim, and fire a gun up to 2 seconds. 2 seconds
might sound like not a lot but there was a study done that showed that if a
knife man was armed and within 21 feet, he will be able to attack a gun man
with the gun in the harness.

The BBC has its issues as well
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC)

In the end, if you want a balanced view of the world. I would recommend
listening to sources that state their bias from both sides.

~~~
unprepare
I logged into my hbonow just to find this clip you are referring to. I
transcribed it for everyone to read for themselves because i think you are
remembering this incorrectly

they were talking about how cops are legally allowed to shoot civilians,
including a quote:

>fatal shootings can be considered legal even if they are unnecessary or
disproportionate

and that police have a name for such killings as "Lawful but Awful"

JohnOliver:

>on top of all this, prosecutors can bring in expert witnesses who can present
nearly any situation as a potential threat. Take dr Bill Lewinsky, who runs
something called the force science institute; for years he has testified on
behalf of police officers. here he is providing rationale for why it may be ok
to shoot someone that has a knife

The clip starts, Bill Lewinsky talking:

>knives can actually be more dangerous than a gun, they dont have to be
reloaded, they can be used at a close distance. And we know that a stab from a
knife, or a stab or a cut can be extremely quick(Makes slashing motion)

John Oliver interrupts him there to make fun of his stabbing motion:

>come on, that is not the motion you make when stabbing someone, that is the
motion you make when you are a teenage magician finishing a trick. 'is this
your card?' but - but there is no doubt there is no doubt a knife is a
dangerous weapon, but what if someone doesnt have a knife? Dr Lewinsky, could
force still be necessary if someone is unarmed?

another clip of lewinsky plays,

>first of all its significant to know that unarmed does not mean theyre not
dangerous. In fact, the fist may have been the first weapon that human beings
used against each other. In fact ive measured strikes of human beings on other
humans and the strikes can occur at a speed of 4 5 or 6 strikes in a second,
and some of them (pounds fist into hand) really hard

Oliver then makes a rock paper scissors joke, and no more clips of lewinsky
are played.

I dont think you could really call this John Oliver saying that knives are not
dangerous, i dont see him joking about police being worried about people with
knives - its clear that he thinks the use of deadly force is happening too
often and with too little consequence for the officers, but thats the point of
the segment.

------
coreyp_1
Sadly, I don't believe that it exists. Everyone seems to have an agenda of
some sort, and the news is colored by their bias.

I scan headlines from multiple sources, consciously avoid clickbait and
paywall sites (Forbes, I'm thinking of you), and try to use my head to think
through issues that I care about. I read an article if it interests me, but I
actually don't fully trust the source.

~~~
GFischer
Journalists can also be awful and distort basic facts (sometimes it's even not
deliberate, just lazy). Seeing something newsworthy in person and then reading
the news reports is eye-opening.

------
chris_va
(Disclaimer: Google engineer and former Google News TL from a while back)

Honestly, it's really difficult. It would be great if something like Google
News worked (and it does generate a diverse set of biases), but it is just
aggregating a relatively biased set of sources.

Slower cycles (weekly, monthly) are generally better, and honestly you could
switch to entirely getting your news on a weekly basis and being just fine.

So I personally would stay away from 24h news coverage. Local papers generally
don't have a diverse editorial staff, and national papers often have deeply
entrenched editorial staff. You can read the wires directly, but coverage is
spotty and so you'll end up with a biased viewpoint regardless. Blogs and
social media all suffer from a lack of editorial process, and while there may
be better information buried deep it's not worth the misinformation burden to
find it.

For weekly cycles, I like The Economist. It does have a bias, but it is a
fairly politically independent one.

------
catdog
There is no such thing as neutral and unbiased news. Journalists often claim
such thing is possible, but it isn't making things worse by hiding their bias.
You can try to find out in what direction the author/news outlet is usually
biased to and try to subtract that, try to find multiple sources to get views
from different angles, try to find reliable hard facts.

~~~
sattoshi
>try to find multiple sources to get views from different angles, try to find
reliable hard facts

This is indeed the way to go. Publications will rarely outright _lie_ to their
readers, but rather conveniently not mention this or that. Reading something
from 2-3 opposing publications will most likely give you the full story.

------
alansmitheebk
I agree with coreyp_1; there are no unbiased news sources. Also, people
perceive bias based on their world view. For example, a Republican in the US
will perceive "liberal bias" in any story that doesn't present Republican
politicians in a positive light, regardless of its veracity.

Having said all of that, some news sources have less spin. I like Reuters:
[http://www.reuters.com/](http://www.reuters.com/). I think they are more
similar to a wire service than a "we cater to your worldview" brand.

As an American, I sadly find that the UK's Guardian have better coverage of
what is happening in the US than most US "news" papers and websites. That
being said, The Guardian have some of the most maddening identity-politik
editorials. One of my "favorite" Guardian editorials was Syreeta McFadden's
piece about how film stock is racist because doesn't pick up the details of
black faces. (Maybe learn how to use a camera, Syreeta. These are these things
called F-stops and shutter speeds). I also "enjoyed" abortion columnist
Jessica Valenti's recent piece in which she mentioned that her friends carry
tote bags bearing the slogan "Lord, give me confidence of a mediocre white
man." ...but I digress...

The intercept is an interesting read. While it certainly has a very strong
point of view, you can be sure that they're not working for "The Man".

BTW, someone where mentioned the Washington Post. Have a look at this before
you tout WP as unbiased: [https://theintercept.com/2016/07/22/oil-lobby-paid-
washingto...](https://theintercept.com/2016/07/22/oil-lobby-paid-washington-
post-and-atlantic-to-host-climate-change-deniers-at-rnc/)

~~~
drdeca
> For example, a Republican in the US will perceive "liberal bias" in any
> story that doesn't present Republican politicians in a positive light,
> regardless of its veracity.

I think this is a bit of an exaggeration.

There are some Republicans who continue to criticize trump freely, after he
won the nomination, even if some of these might still prefer him to Hillary
Clinton.

Though some republicans would probably interpret almost any criticism as bias.

Did you mean most republicans or just at least some?

Maybe you meant things that criticize republican politicians as a group? To
me, that seems likely to be more true.

~~~
alansmitheebk
I'm talking about the kind of Republicans that rail against "The Mainstream
Media", which basically means anything that isn't Fox News, Brietbart, Rush
Limbaugh, etc. These people literally think that all news is "liberal lies"
unless it's coming from a rightwing source.

Am I talking about most Republicans? That I don't know. I haven't conducted a
poll to see how many Republicans have that mentality. Certainly anyone who
supports trump or watches Fox News on a regular basis has that mentality --and
that's a lot of people!

~~~
ArkyBeagle
But that's just the galloping narcissism of our times.

~~~
alansmitheebk
Well, it's quite significant. How can we even talk about which news is
objective when their is a large portion of the US population that consider
rightwing pundits to be "the real news" and everything else to be lies? This
is a major problem. We are living in a reality distortion field where George
W. Bush has never been criticized for failing to protect us from 9/11 but
people want to "lock her up!" [Hillary Clinton] because an embassy in Benghazi
was attacked?

I realize I'm going off topic here but sooner or later we have to confront
this issue. Reality is not subjective. If our society can't learn how to parse
reality we will never be able to unfuck ourselves.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
[https://xkcd.com/258/](https://xkcd.com/258/)

------
spoonie
You don't. You have to put in the work to understand the particular bias and
reputation of each sure you read. And then you have to seek out additional
sources that are biased in different ways so that you can see all sides of the
debate. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch (TANSTAAFL).

------
551199
There is no such thing as unbiased news.

Best thing to do is to read news from left and right media or in country
relations, say US and Russia, from both sides. Usually the truth lies
somewhere between.

~~~
alasdair_
The problem with this is that both "left" and "right" media have a vested
interest in keeping people seeing the world in terms of "left" and "right".

There are more than two viewpoints.

~~~
551199
Agreed. OP asked where to read unbiased international news and there is no
such thing.

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the
newspaper, you're misinformed." -Probably not Mark Twain

------
greatest-ape
Since you probably already know the various establishment newspapers such as
The New York Times, WSJ and The Economist, I would suggest watching speeches
by and interviews with Noam Chomsky. Is he neutral? No. Nobody is. But he has
a completely different perspective. And in line with the other comments in
this thread, I think you need to check out different perspectives to get
closer to the truth.

Edit: also, check out The Guardian and The Intercept.

------
ArkyBeagle
It's not news but there is always CSPAN/CPSAN2/CSPAN3 .

I consider Frontline to be neutral long-form analysis.

Other than that, use the basic news programs as aggregators and dig for
yourself. Nobody's gonna do it for you. The problem is less bias than it is
differences in opinion of what makes a story interesting. Trainwrecks are
interesting, so everything is a trainwreck.

------
qwrusz
Good news and bad news...

Bad news is there is no unbiased news.

Good news it is pretty easy to train yourself to see bias and remove/ignore
it. And once you do reading the news becomes a lot faster. As you can skip
sections or entire articles below the headline that are clearly opinions
masquerading as news.

Lastly, it won't be breaking news, but for many bigger events there is a
wikipedia that can be a surprisingly accurate and unbiased account.

------
jkoschei
No such thing as news without bias — all content reflects the biases of its
creators. Even if somehow there were no bias reflected in the article/video
itself, there's always bias in which news is presented.

I think the best thing to do is to get news from multiple sources (at least
3). The truth is somewhere in between.

------
atmosx
There's no such thing as unbiased news, especially _international news_. Not
even Reuters or AP manage to be un-biased. Biases flow in like thin air from
cracks without the journalist even noticing, because of framing[1].

You have to understand that for a _news story_ to be unbiased you have to
report just the fact, e.g. "Bombing in Alepo, 13 dead". However, that's not
even considered reporting for most people, since they lack the context: Where
is Alepo, why is important, who bombed them? The moment you put context on a
reality that is so complex, you're starting to putting upfront your biases.
Even referencing a US-based institution vs a Chinese or Russian based
institution is a form of rather strong bias.

So since everyone is biased what we can do to reach a balanced compromised is
the following:

* Make sure we understand where the author comes from[2].

* Accept the fact that we don't know, hence remain open to other possibilities/interpretation

* Try (and you have to try hard...) to look for the truth. Most of us, read the publications that are ideologically aligned with our beliefs. That doesn't help much, as we already _know_ the strong arguments for our case.

Some high quality publications in my view are:

* The New York Times * The Atlantic * The New Yorker

[1] _In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and
theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies, organize,
perceive, and communicate about reality_ , URL:
[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Framing_(social_sciences)](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Framing_\(social_sciences\))

[2] I still remember the WSJ presenting the saviour of miners in South
American as a _win of capitalism_ while it was, by all means, the exact
opposite. It was _companies-do-what-they-do_ who put them in that situation,
plus all the tech that powered the machines that saved them, were founded by
public research.

------
pasbesoin
For analysis and perspective on the media, there's the excellent NPR radio
show -- wait for it... -- "On the Media".

On a good week, I find myself thinking it's one of the more important shows
around, right now.

The podcast is quite convenient to grab. Try a couple of weeks' worth, as
individual shows can vary a bit as to content and presentation, depending upon
the week and what they are covering.

[http://www.wnyc.org/shows/otm](http://www.wnyc.org/shows/otm)

[http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia](http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia)

------
ilaksh
I don't expect to get unbiased news. But if I want a realistic and accurate
perspective from an individual or group then I would look at blogs, a person's
youtube channel, or some less centralized group. Then combine a bunch of them
and you may get a more real picture. Or documentaries sometimes are truthful.

But I think you need lots of primary sources close to the action, like people,
expect them all to be biased towards their own situation, synthesize those
reports together.

War propaganda is a big part of regular news everywhere including the US.

------
spcelzrd
I'm in the US.

Google News is the best for overall quick, algorithmic look at world events.

I like Washington Post, The Economist, and Deadspin.

If you're worried about bias, my assumption is you want to see a particular
bias. Thinking critically about the information you receive is vastly more
important than getting unbiased information.

If you always get time from a single clock, you won't recognize when that
clock drifts. If two clocks don't agree, then you know one of them is wrong.
Are you only looking at one clock?

Also, no one watches news anymore. That's barbaric.

~~~
coreyp_1
I'm just a grad student, but I'm shocked/appalled at the sheer number of
undergrads whose only source of "news" is news satire (e.g., The Daily Show)
or vlogs (e.g., insert <politically-vocal-youtuber-who-agrees-with-their-
opinions> here).

------
beefield
I also doubt an unbiased news source exist, all of them have some agenda. But
to me, I find that one of the news sources with strongest bias towards common
sense is The Economist.

------
ap22213
I've been enjoying Vice daily news on HBO. The downside is that it's way to
short to cover many topics or any in depth.

------
DrNuke
Nothing is neutral or unbiased, you need to form your own point of view (aka
develop a perspective from your own history, society, ambitions and moral
attitude) about life and its events in order to relate with people and their
opinions, also making a comparison.

------
stray
/var/log

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ahartman00
I have found Christian Science Monitor to be pretty unbiased. They also report
the good news that happens, which is something I think is important. I dont
like the scare tactics used by some sources.

~~~
source99
They are a bit click-baity for my taste.

~~~
ahartman00
Lately they have been, you're right. I feel like they resisted that trend
longer than the other news outlets??

------
jwtadvice
I'm in the US. My recommendations are for other US civilians.

I recommend reading or watching press briefings at the State Department and
White House, and take the journalists questions more seriously than the Press
Offices' answers. Josh Earnest at the head of the White House Press Office has
bragged about creating echo chambers in the US domestic press - and it's true
that these press briefings are where most "establishment" news outlets get
their narrative take on ongoing events.

Taking the questions more seriously than the answers allows you to understand
the criticisms, concerns and complexities in ongoing situations - rather than
the spin that comes out of Public Relations talk.

Then, I would recommend watching C-SPAN for particular legislation and events
you are interested in. It's very easy to see their schedule - they have it
posted online.

For understanding policy considerations, I recommend watching panels and
reading reports from "Washington Thinktanks". These centers are often "track
two" political outlets, meaning that they are direct interactions between US
academics and officials with academics and officials from abroad, while they
are outside official duties and obligations. Nothing gets decided in these
thinktanks, but many ideas percolate here, and ideas that are happening behind
closed doors cast shadows on "track two" conversations.

Take care when picking thinktanks. They have different political and foreign
"allegiances" and are often collections of retired and influential people with
particular perspectives. I would recommend sampling between a few of them.

For news, take care to avoid getting news exclusively from domestic sources
and also exclusively from allied sources. Al Jazeera, for example, is owned
and operated by the government of Qatar - a US ally. You will see different
takes on world events from Al Jazeera, but you will not see narrative or
supporting information for events that hurt joint American and Qatari
initiatives. Sky News and the BBC are of course similar.

The Guardian and Der Speigel did the best jobs covering the actual content of
the Snowden disclosures (even though the British Government infiltrated and
censored that coverage eventually), so I have grown fonder of them recently.

I would recommend picking up a few "frindge" outlets, such as "The Intercept"
or following the ACLU, so that internal civil rights controversies make the
public feed - as they often do not on domestic and allied information
publications.

Finally it's incredibly important to read source materials. That means reading
the Snowden Disclosures, the Pentagon Papers, the CIA Torture Documents, the
DNC Leaks, etc yourself. These controversial news items are too important to
have your opinion colored by someone else's summary.

It's best if you also read proposed legislation, or at least check the
sections that are referred to by various outlets.

Know that there are state and non-state actors actively trying to color the
perception and distort the facts on certain issues. The Obama Administration
infamously censored the Ferguson protests and hacked the Associated Press to
determine the identity of sources leaking information about the proposed Iran
Deal (just for example). National Security Journalists have been caught time
and time again reporting stories with slant directly provided by US
intelligence agencies (Ken Dilanian, Judith Miller, etc). Major establishment
outlets chose terminology such as "Bulk Collection" during the Snowden
Disclosures rather than using the more accurate but more controversial "Mass
Surveillance."

It's difficult to make suggestions for sources of information because no
source or combination of sources should determine your opinion. You have to
act, as much as you can in your limited amount of time and energy, like your
own investigative reporter.

------
dhogan
Surprised it hasn't been said but... here?

I think articles + discussion can help in ways to weed out bias (though it can
certainly go the other way as well).

------
source99
I try not to read news on the web.

I've gone so far as to redirect a bunch of news sites that I habitually
frequent to 127.0.0.1 in my /etc/hosts file.

------
sgt101
Read "Private Eye" it's from the UK and is utterly focused on exposing
everyone, everywhere at any time who is up to no good!

------
NumberCruncher
The Tv channel Arte seems to be quite unbiased, at least compared to others. I
live in Germany.

------
mmerlin
For Australia & New Zealand: www.macrobusiness.com.au

