Good article. The author suggests that news in print is accurate. I believe that more times than not, it is more accurate than online news. However, it does not eliminate bias.
I get my news online by scanning CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC. I view ALL news as being biased (online or print) and by looking at several sources I figure that the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
Some other benefits of printed news (even if still biased): the ads in print stay where they are. They don't hover over the article I'm trying to read and force the reader to click 'X'. They don't start playing video clips. They don't have ads switching in and out and moving around. Print also has no way of tracking what I read.
How is this not just the golden mean fallacy? Just because two sources make different claims doesn’t mean the truth is equidistant between them, or between them at all since one source could be accurate and the other peddling complete bullshit.
In fact applying this system over time will just shift your view of the world toward whichever “side” is willing to tell more extreme lies.
I don't know what other people mean by middle, but what I do is take the things that are agreed on by most organisations as probably true, and disregard the rest.
Source A: An abused elephant got revenge on its handlers today, striking back and making a break for freedom.
Source B: Elephant attack! 5 gravely injured, including a mother of 3, as a crazed elephant breaks loose. Authorities still investigating.
Source C: Minister for Elephants grilled over lax elephant regulations. Angry citizens are demanding to know why legislation had not been put in place to prevent this tragedy.
My take away: Something happened, people got hurt, an elephant was involved.
Me at the water cooler: You hear about the elephant thing? Pretty crazy right.
what I do is take the things that are agreed on by most organisations as probably true, and disregard the rest
What I do is use the mainstream media to inform me of a general situation, then look at actual firsthand sources, then watch for patterns of which MM sources have patterns of spinning/lying on which topics. ("Firsthand sources" meaning actual text of legislation, police reports, transcripts, and such)
The "take things that are agreed on by most media organisations as probably true, and disregard the rest" strategy has had profoundly negative effects throughout history, such as in China, the Soviet Bloc before 1991, the USA through the 1960s, and Germany in the 1930s.
I go to firsthand sources, or at the very least more informative write ups than news articles, for things that are going to influence my decisions or that I have more than the minimum amount of curiosity for. That rarely has anything to do with News though. High level politics - particularly foreign (US for me), natural disasters, celebrity deaths, war progress, spy poisonings, sports results, etc all have very little to do with my life.
I specifically included the water cooler part because that's what Generic News is for me. Conversation fodder and entertainment. I can live with even the filtered down information I take from it being possibly wrong.
You can often interpolate with this type of approach, skim three articles from sources with biases you know and the common facts that you would see in a formal fact finding will stay constant, but the commentary and opinions become obvious leaving you with the facts, what various groups think and a lot better informed to reach a useful understanding.
Personally, I outright disregard a large number of sources - There's so much rubbish online that the 'middle ground' is extremely unlikely to be the truth.
I have the same view of "the truth is in the middle." I supplement my news with itar-tass, xinhua, and irna to calibrate my view globally.
It's also an exercise of learning what ways other people view the world. How can you understand someone that only gets information from one channel if you don't know what that channel is saying?
The problem you have is with the view points that are simply not represented by any of those outlets - you can't compare several sources and find the middle for those things.
What kind of view points might be consistently ignored or misrepresented across multiple apparently differing media outlets?
Herman and Chomsky went into this with their propaganda model: the corporate establishment media will have a pro-corporate pro-establishment viewpoint.
All your sources there are heavily pro-corporate and pro-establishment, by the very fact they are funded by corporations (BBC is a bit different but it is influenced in similar ways)
Our mainstream media sources run (some of) the gamut of right to left, but have a consistent bias on particular matters due to their funding.
I always wonder about what things are not shown in the news at all or are seen as so minor as to not warrant an 'agenda' with significant coverage. I remember that I am not the one deciding what is important to show in media, someone else is. I don't like the idea of someone else training my mind on what I should be paying attention to and what should be important to me.
This is the real reason to seek out a diversity of sources, not a misguided pursuit of "neutrality" or absolute truth. Every media outlet is biased, and expresses that bias through their editorial decisions on what is "newsworthy."
Agree 100%. We're building a product to help people find multiple, credible viewpoints on news stories - at http://civikowl.com. (Apologies for the shameless plug but hope it's helpful to folks reading this thread).
I optimize for calm, dispassionate analysis of news.
I only get my news from print sources that charge money or have a clear funding model not primarily reliant on advertising: The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, NPR, etc. I used to read The Economist as well but there's only so much time I'm willing to allot.
I skip the daily outrage. I skip most editorials and opinion pieces. I can form my own opinions. Sources that report the news breathlessly or with shouting heads are out. Sources that rely primarily on Facebook shares to promote their articles are out.
I add to that mix a healthy dose of historical context.
That said, the truth is not always somewhere in the middle. Maybe it is between polar-opposite propaganda sources, but not between The Guardian and Breitbart.
The New York Times is not only "reliant on advertising" to stay afloat, advertising was its primary source of revenue for its entire history until 2012. Only for the past 6 years has advertising revenue not exceeded circulation revenue, and they'd go under without advertising revenue even now.
The Guardian is reliant on advertising as much as subscriptions (though there is then the income from its trust investments and other assets, which are dwindling and at risk).
The BBC is reliant on the support of the UK government, who essentially control it's future.
Serious analysis of the editorial lines of The Guardian and the BBC show pretty consistent pro-corporate pro-establishment bias.
If the story, or viewpoint, is simply not available in the sources because of their common bias then reading multiple sources and making your own opinion won't help.
It's difficult to form an opinion about issues that are not presented to you.
> I get my news online by scanning CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC. I view ALL news as being biased (online or print) and by looking at several sources I figure that the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
Frankly, these are all sources which don't disagree with each other very much, fundamentally.
On how they present those facts and the co text the provide for understanding? Quite a bit sometimes.
Also, the amount a story is promoted sends an implicit signal as too how important you should view it, and that's often different for different sources as well.
I don't go through as many sources, but I'll often look to see how Fox News is presenting something compared to WaPo, and there's often quite different presentations. Sometimes I have to search a little deep for what one network considers big breaking news on another network.
It's a more subtle problem than some people think.
Wikipedia has a current events portal. I think it's a pretty decent way to stay abreast of events without falling prey to the outrage cycle. Basically, nothing shows up on there unless it is significant enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry. That may not be the perfect filtering criteria, but it's world better than the algorithm that decides what ends up on the front page of Google News.
I suggest using spidr.today[0], it's a wonderful aggregator. What makes it different from the competition is that it makes it trivially easy to compare how different news sources narrate the same piece of news
It's pretty telling how narrow their definition of "all sides" is when Huffington Post and The New Yorker make up the furthest left of their spectrum. This in a world where the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS.org) and It's Going Down News (@IGD_News) are but a click away.
Are you saying they lean right, or just need more extreme examples? I don't see Breitbart on there, either, FWIW.
Maybe they're applying a "not too far left or right" filter or a "popularity" filter in order to keep from having so many takes on a given story that it's overwhelming?
I use /r/neutralnews for this purpose. I wish there were at least some professional news outlets with an expressed commitment to political neutrality. It seems like an unfilled niche.
Do you mean an actual commitment or an expressed commitment? They had the latter, but very much not the former, to the extent that the latter had been a source of jokes for many years.
There are a ton of professional news outlets with expressed commitment to political neutrality.
Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral.
I think people want to be able to believe that their news sources are neutral. But I don't think they actually want their news sources to be neutral. That's the genius of what news has become: entertainment that justifies itself by allowing you to feel like you are doing your duty as a citizen by keeping up with current events.
I think we agree that news sources aren't neutral simply because they express a commitment to neutrality.
I think that we also agree that people believe news sources are neutral when those news sources aren't neutral.
However, I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "wanting your news sources to be neutral" and "wanting to be able to believe that your news sources are neutral". It's both pedantic and not borne out by any evidence. You're assuming motivations which simply aren't apparent.
What I'm getting at is this: people don't want to base their positions on objective facts. They want to base their positions on how they feel. In order to facilitate this, it is useful to have a news source that claims to be objective, but is actually slanted toward confirming the righteousness of the positions you hold. Thus, people want to believe that their favorite news source is objective (so they can justify their position with righteous conviction), but they don't actually want it to be objective (so they can avoid the terrifying work of modifying their worldview).
I get what you're saying, and I'm saying that what you're saying is both pedantic and not borne out by evidence.
The paper you linked concludes that reasoning (when done correctly) works as intended regardless of the motives for reasoning. Given that reasoning (when done correctly) works regardless of the motives for reasoning, when people incorrectly reason that a news source is neutral, it indicates that reasoning was not done correctly, and that their motivations for reasoning aren't a constructive explanation for why they didn't reason correctly (i.e. your point is pedantic).
Further, the article you linked doesn't go so far as to disagree with my point--it doesn't make the mistake you're making, which is to assume that people can't want more than one thing. People can want to base their news source to be neutral AND people can want to feel good (i.e. not feel cognitive dissonance). Even if you were to somehow prove your not-evident point, it doesn't give you a basis to disagree with what I said, unless you can prove that people want to feel good to the exclusion of all other things they want from their news source. The article doesn't say that (i.e. your point is not borne out by evidence, even the evidence that you presented).
I think we're arguing past each other and I think that is my fault.
In evolutionary psychology, there is a distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. So, the proximate cause for pursuing sex is that orgasms are intensely pleasurable. But the ultimate cause is that pursuing sex leads to better reproductive outcomes, so we evolved the ability to orgasm and, thus, a motivation to pursue sex.
I think you are arguing in terms of proximate causes. Somebody desires a neutral news source so that they feel like they are accurately informed about what is going on in the world. I don't disagree with this. Most people genuinely want a neutral news source. But the weird thing is that they do not actually consume a neutral news source, even though it is trivially easy to figure out that your news source isn't neutral. All you have to do is read the other side's preferred news source.
To explain this seeming paradox, I am arguing in terms of ultimate causes. I think that this failure to reason accurately about the neutrality of news sources comes about, ultimately, because news consumption is not only about informing yourself, but also to a large extent about reaffirming the righteousness of your in-group. And I think that the appearance of neutrality is critical to enabling this self-deception to occur (because a person is much more convincing when they actually believe the position they're arguing for).
Thus my insistence on what you referred as pedantic: people don't actually want to consume a neutral news source, they want to believe that they consume a neutral news source. And not 'want' in the proximate sense that they know that they are deceiving themselves, but 'want' as a shorthand way to describe the ultimate cause for the prevalence of this self-deception.
Okay, so to describe what happened here in your terms:
1. I stated the proximate cause.
2. You disagreed, because you wanted to use "want" to describe ultimate rather than proximate causes.
3. Now you're agreeing with the proximate cause I stated and still insisting on your ultimate cause.
Do you see why this might be considered pedantic? You disagreed with what I said based on a meaning of the word "want", when in fact the way I was using the word "want" is correct?
The problem with ultimate causes is that because they're further away from the effect they're describing, so it's fairly difficult to establish a causal relationship.
Sex and reproduction have a well-developed constructive theory (evolution) around them--the causal relationship is believed to be true because evolution predicts it and also predicts a wide variety of things which we know to be true. But even so, evolution can be difficult to tie to phenomena--for example, it takes a fairly deep understanding of evolution to understand how evolution is compatible with homosexuality.
I can see how your ultimate cause might cause the phenomena we're discussing, but that simply means that the hypothesis is viable and worth testing--it doesn't yet indicate any evidence for your hypothesis. So again I'm still saying: you haven't provided any evidence for what you're saying. You may have evidence for your assertion, but you certainly haven't presented it.
Even if you have evidence for this: how is insisting on an ultimate cause a response to my original point? I said that "Expressing a commitment to political neutrality is a good move for a news source, because it costs no money and most people want their news sources to be neutral." The point being that we shouldn't trust that news sources are neutral or even trying to be neutral simply because they express a commitment to neutrality. Even if you're right, your jumping in to disagree with completely irrelevant information was, frankly, rude.
I'm not sure at this point whether I believe you intended to talk about ultimate versus proximal causes, or if you're just smart and managed to come up with that after the fact as a way to not have to admit you were wrong. Either way, I'm not going to respond to further comments on this thread.
> I think we're arguing past each other and I think that is my fault.
I'm sorry that I caused you to feel like I was being disingenuous (or however you would describe your emotions), but I was truly just trying to reconcile and understand our disagreement.
Also, the speaking about evolutionary forces in anthropomorphic terms like 'want', etc. is pretty common. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins at one point goes into a lengthy digression of why this is a useful way to talk about evolutionary processes and what exactly is and isn't meant by this manner of speaking. Realizing that me doing this was the primary source of our disagreement was what prompted my last comment.
But anyway, I agree that this conversation is getting long in the tooth.
Reading your comment I immediately scoffed and thought, well what a cute marketing trick, I’m sure I’ll click over and just read more of the same....
Imagine my shock to see the top post pointing to RealClearInvestigations analyzing the role of “PROMISE” discipline policies on Cruz’s ability to pull off his attack even after over 40 run-ins with the police.
Then again, the next half dozen link to articles about; a man allegedly attacking immigrants after yelling “Get out of my country”, Gary Cohen resignation, successful teacher strike gaining a 5% raise, Stormy Daniels sues Trump, and Kellyanne Conway violating ethics rules.
I listen to KQED on a regular basis. It's a lot of things, but politically neutral can't be reasonably claimed to be among them. Not unless you think sitting square between 70s-type radicals and mainstream centerism is a form of neutrality. I generally agree with their politics, but I find the constant slant somewhat annoying.
To put it another way: it's very possible to interpret fairness and impartiality in creative ways. And some NPR member stations make a habit of this.
The biggest issue I have with NPR is selection bias. They spend a large fraction of the day airing stories of poverty and despair, closely related to hot-button political issues (USA healthcare, etc) that end in a tone of "we stated the facts of the matter, and the facts are that people are suffering." It is obvious that they are imploring the listener toward more liberal viewpoints.
Faithful NPR (specifically my local branch) listener here. I agree with your general point, though I notice it most with immigration related stories. The thing I appreciate about how NPR covers things though is that their commentators are almost never spokespeople/PR reps. They are legit professionals in the field, elected officials, or people who seriously study this subject matter. Of course they still have bias, but not _nearly_ as much as what I hear / see in other media which is "person whose literal/only job is to promote political stance X."
Political neutrality is defined by the frame, and it includes the fact that facts, themselves, are political, in that some political views are incompatible with certain facts. Therefore, including certain facts in your worldview pushes some political sources out of the frame as being factually incorrect, which is a form of bias.
For example, political views from someone who insists that global warming isn't happening are out-of-frame as being factually incorrect. That means a number of right-wing sites are gone, as the insistence that there is no global warming is more of a right-wing conceit than left-wing.
The alternative is not ignoring anyone, regardless of how lunatic they are, which means you admit known nutcases like whale.to and Natural News into your news diet, and that will give you a very warped view of the world.
People who have a restricted media diet are pretty easy to surprise just by relaying objective information nobody really disputes that their news sources didn't deem newsworthy.
Natural news et al may not be worth paying attention to but foreign propaganda outfits (e.g. Russia today) can sometimes be quite informative if read skeptically, even if only to add context.
This is an interesting idea for understanding how different worldviews form.
Possibly also how sentiments like "facts have a liberal bias" or "liberals live in a fantasy" come about and ring true. The set of facts you use to judge who/what is 'in-frame' are essential to your understanding of the world. Someone else who treats those facts as optional ("Sure they don't believe in global warming, but they understand the issues with immigration") clearly has a poor understanding of "how the world works".
Wikipedia itself is an excellent source of information particularly on long-developing stories.
This is a point I first realised in 2004 immediately following the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Indonesia and the Indian Ocean. As traditional media outlets struggled (some more successfully than others) to both present the current status and new developments, Wikipedia offered a digest of the best current state of knowledge, and, via its changelogs, what had been recently changed (generally: added, occasionally removed).
This is a pattern that's followed through, say, the 2010 Tohoku quake + tsunami + nuclear core meltdown, several long-running financial and business stories, Russian campaign interference, the Oroville Dam crisis, etc. Pretty much any story that runs more than 1-3 days and has complex elements.
I'm very well aware that Wikipedia is not perfect, is subject to influence, and is not itself a primary source. There is the odd outlet or journalist which exceeds Wikipedia (Brad Plumer, formerly of Vox and now of The New York Times, for example, has the best article I've seen, hands, down, on Oroville, though that was and remains a one-point-in-time effort, Wikipedia continues to update its article. Plumer, is, by the way, and absolutely excellent journalist, and as before, I am not his mother....).
Wikimedia's expansion into journalism is a fascinating development.
I'm hopeful about their expansion into journalism. When I can contain my addictive relationship with news, the current events portal is close to perfect for me. I hadn't crystalized the thought, but what you said about it being a great source for long developing stories is absolutely true and one of the things I appreciate most about it.
There's also WikiTribune [1] for more long-form reporting. I donate so people can get informed, reasoned journalism that's not PR hit/puff pieces or distracting bullshit.
Plus they solicit ideas from readers in addition to content from journalists.
Eliminating notification spam sounds great and reading daily newspapers sounds great, but I've tried another variant of this with some success. Reading just the weekly version of the Economist left me vast amounts of free time and I didn't feel any less informed than when I was reading several sources over the course of a day.
Of course, that's my own estimation of how well informed I was, so that might be far from accurate.
I used to get by on The Economist and a smattering of online news. It works pretty well, but not so much for a world that feels like it's moving really quickly.
This week:
Nunberg subpoenaed, couldn’t stop blabbing;
Kellyanne said to have violated ethics law;
Carson realized HUD’s complicated;
Cohn quit, over tariffs not anti-Semitism;
Guy from UAE who knows stuff, cooperating w/Mueller;
Trump tweeted there’s no chaos;
It’s only Tuesday.
... and she wrote that before the news broke about the porn star suing Trump about their hush agreement/money inked in the weeks before the election.
I subscribed to the Washington Post via Amazon for national coverage, and I also get my local paper for their coverage of things like city council meetings, which actually make a lot more differences in our day to day lives than a lot of national issues.
> This week: Nunberg subpoenaed, couldn’t stop blabbing; Kellyanne said to have violated ethics law; Carson realized HUD’s complicated; Cohn quit, over tariffs not anti-Semitism; Guy from UAE who knows stuff, cooperating w/Mueller; Trump tweeted there’s no chaos; It’s only Tuesday.
If you consider all of that ‘news’ rather than mostly rumor and spectacle, then you probably fit in with the social media news crowd.
I personally don’t see anything on that list that’s worthy of being called News, and certainly not anything I’d need to read about the day it happened. The closets might be the Mueller thing, but even that is technically hearsay until mueller’s next report comes out - then it’s news.
I don't mean to pick on you specifically, because I'm sure you have your reasons for saying "this stuff matters". However, I am curious of what the value is of staying that up to date in the news cycle other than dopamine hits. Seems more like an addiction to stay that on top of the news cycle than a more measured approach like the weekly economist digests posited above.
The Economist just doesn't cover everything that's going on.
Realistically, any one of us could ignore most news and be fine, but I feel that it's part of our job as citizens to be informed and aware. I also feel that it's worth kicking in some money to the people doing the journalism that's uncovering important stuff.
Look at the Roy Moore stuff that got uncovered, for instance. That was the election right there.
I'm a big fan of The Economist and have bought and/or subscribed to it pretty much continuously for almost twenty years now (young old man that i am), but unless you're entirely beholden to its agenda, which I find very un-self-questioning - I'd suggest you offset its perspective with a 'complementary adversarial' weekly.
Last time I swore off excess media consumption (about a decade ago) I kept on with The Economist and found I was 'drinking the Kool Aid' after a while.
I conducted a study of the relative mentions of an arbitrarily selected set of high-informational indicators (the Foreign Policy list of top 100 global thinkers), and looked for references to those amongst numerous online domains (and TLDs), including several mainstream and alternative media sources.
The Economist and The Financial Times both rate excellently amongst mainstream publications. Each has a very distinct pro-business, pro-banking, and overt pro-free-trade[1] agenda (though not unquestioningly so), though the quality is generally good.
Amongst the more highly-rating alternatives were (in no particular order):
1. Mother Jones
2. The Christian Science Monitor
3. The Nation
4. Jacobin Magazine. (Probably the most directly ideologically opposed publication.)
5. Alternet, The Real News, and Truthdig, each of which has a diverse though sometimes questionable set of contributors.
Selecting from amongst these might be useful.
My survey, of about 100 distinct domains, is not complete and has various methodological issues, but should be a good guide.
________________________________
Notes:
1. See The Economist's own Prospectus:
THE ECONOMIST, which will contain — First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day....
To be honest, I'm not sure of a competing one-stop shop - I certainly didn't know when I last fasted from media.
These days I do a daily scan of all the none-too-tabloidy newspapers (UK-based here), and on a weekly-or-so basis take in the likes of The Spectator, National Review and Foreign Affairs.
- edit:
I'm not going to lie - I could probably do with another breather - I'm unsure how much value I get from scouring all this crap.
Newstatesman in the UK for a left wing weekly, politics centred periodical with minimal arts section and the book reviews are essentially ideological articles. the Spectator is more popular and a Tory/ right wing weekly with almost half of it devoted to culture, books, arts etc. I found the arts component of the Spectator to be relatively free of ideology.
Recently I bought both and compared them. I found the writing quality in the newstatesman to be more variable, with a few Excellent and a few utterly awful articles. The Spectator is overall of good quality but nothing really stood out.
I go open step below that: most of my news comes from The Economist and similar weekly newspapers, but I also keep notification spam for important news from the BBC, which is mostly unbiased.
I'm glad I know about yesterday's resignation of one of Trump's economic aides, but I don't spend valuable minutes trying to find everyone's opinions about its consequences.
I'm in my 20s and used to read the local paper religiously. It is nice and relaxing, but reasons I quit:
- Portability: I did most of my reading on public transit. Hauling around a huge packet to read definitely made me feel like an old person.
- Quanitity: It was really tough disposing of the quantity of paper. If you skipped a day for whatever reason, the papers could really start piling up. I tried to end weekend service (the massive advertising packets that contained no news), and sales basically laughed me away.
- Lack of news: So much of the paper was throwaway lifestyle stuff.
- Pricing: It starts out cheap, but afterward they kind of lock you in.
I ended up meeting in the middle. I have a Sunday-only subscription with the New York Times. I get a physical paper on Sunday and the rest of the week I have access to the replica edition included (which is the print edition, just available through the PressReader app) - I have a 12.9" iPad Pro I read said replica edition on which gets me as close to the experience of reading a broadsheet as possible considering I'm still reading on a screen.
Yeah, my promo discount just ended so instead of ~$20/mo it's costing me $40/mo - but I value having a condensed, well curated collection of relevant news articles so the cost is easily justified for me.
I have the digital NYT subscription this last year after decades with print. Can I use this PressReader? Googling gave me lots of links to non-NYTimes.com sites which I necessarily do not trust. Thanks!
The free replica edition is only included with a print subscription, you can subscribe to the replica edition directly [0] which also includes one standard NYTimes.com account however.
If you have family members that you share (or would like to share) your NYTimes.com membership with getting a Sunday print subscription may also be an option. It's 2x the cost of the replica edition subscription (as well as an All-Access digital subscription which comes with 2 accounts) without promotional pricing but you get 2 additional NYTimes.com memberships, access to the crossword online and of course the Sunday print delivered to you if that's your thing.
PressReader on mobile is pretty decent, there are tons of free sample papers and magazines available you can give a try to get a feel for it to see if it's your thing or not.
There's some annoying hiccups with the NYTimes replica edition that bug me, if you pull up the text-view of an article that's on the front page and continued elsewhere you'll often get just the continuation instead of the full article (I don't know who to blame here, it's not deal-breaking but it is annoying) - but in general scrolling and paging around feels good, the app always downloads content to your device so offline viewing is there 100% of the time and the interface is workable. One other little nuisance is you can't link your NYTimes replica edition account to your existing PressReader account, so you have to manage them separately and sign into both (which the app allows, fortunately).
Overall, would recommend, but give it a try before you commit to spending any money.
I don't care much about our local papers (Germany).
They all get their political and current news sections from bigger newspapers (mantle).
What they do themselves is obituaries, local sports (especially children and youths, because parents just love to read their children's name – which means that often all the players are named) and local news.
The first is for old people, the second for young parents, and the last is the only potentially interesting thing, but since they don't do real investigations (especially into the precious ad buyers) or reporting of local (social) issues, just quick "we met person x, asked ten questions, took a photo and wrote ten paragraphs", and it's very few pages, I don't see the sense in buying it.
It was really tough disposing of the quantity of paper.
I've had daily print subscription(s) since I was 21, and I've recycled essentially every single page since. We had curbside recycling pickup where I lived then, and I just couldn't bring myself to throw papers in the garbage after that. (Yes, I realize that there is only an incremental benefit to paper recycling presently.)
I have a print subscription to the weekend edition of the financial times, and I love it.
It's quite fast to browse compared to online articles. You can skim a page and quickly see which articles are interesting. And uyou may read things you wouldn't have read online, as it's easy to glance past a headline and read a paragraph of an unfamiliar story.
When I had a weekly newspaper subscription, I didn't just skim, but stress out about what I 'had' to read or 'should' read. Real paper feels graver and more important to me than the web.
Same with both Harper's and Lapham's Quarterly, which I really should read some day. Them now being two years old.
After reading the Black swan (Taken), I stopped reading every news outlet and did my best to not know up to the minute news. Like the author, I've felt more informed and able to make better decisions and hold better conversations because I'm not bombarded by constantly changing "facts". In fact, I feel liberated and but inundated with microscopic thoughts, but instead more general ideas. YMMV.
Very similar story here. I straight up miss some things, but nothing truly important. I've been spending more time deepening my career skills and the payoff versus being "on top of" current events has been enormous.
I want to add another suggestion - try a podcast like “The Daily” from NYT. It’s about 20 minutes long per episode, and covers one or two of the most important issues of the day. It’s a more human/meaningful experience for me, because you hear the voices of people who are directly affected by the news (such as the students from parkland). It adds an emotional depth, and I feel like I can stay up to date with current events without mindlessly scanning dozens of articles. The host, Michael Barbaro, is fantastic and pleasant to listen to. Give it a try!
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I listen to and enjoy "The Daily" as well. However, I dislike the "human interest" stories. I would prefer it to be an unemotional summary of the previous days news.
I'm not a robot and I don't hate humans. ;-) However, I feel like those kind of stories can trick you into making illogical decisions. I.e. "think of the children" argument for some new policy. It is a trend in news that I dislike. I think they are trying to make the news more engaging but I think it is leading to poorer decision making.
I bought myself the NYT Sunday edition in print for 2017. If they could fix their subscription model I would have kept it, but after a year it doubled in price and customer support gave me flashbacks of trying to deal with AOL.
I started reading the news in print because it was less stressful and I needed to train myself not to open the news each time I fired up a browser. The online papers put the opinion and doomsday headlines all over the place and I just needed to read a refined source of news that had time to be digested before it was published.
The Washington Post has been a surprisingly good source of news over the last year as well. I prefer it over the NYT at this point and wish I could get it in print where I live.
Aside from the many far leaning online sources, my general rule of thumb is just to avoid anything that is linked to TV. When CNN figures out how to rewind to 1990, I might change my mind. But print allowed me to take a moment and digest the news. Online was almost always in a state of panic, especially over the last year.
I signed up for a NY Times Sunday subscription because at the time it was roughly the same price as the full-access digital subscription, but the price has gone up over time.
However, I find the print edition is a much better experience than the digital platforms. Mostly because I can simply ignore the mostly awful editorial section or things that are buried in eg Style, whereas on the site and app those pieces are mixed-in with the news, giving the appearance of bias. Also, there are often pieces which appear on page A6 of the newspaper which are buried on the website, so you get a very different view of the news with the actual paper.
>As for pricing, my local paper charges more for a digital subscription that to deliver a paper to my house. Subscription models are messed up.
It's because print advertising is still more effective than digital. We've been hearing for more than a decade that this will change any day now, but it hasn't happened yet. And the more people use ad blockers, the longer it will remain true.
I would encourage US residents who want a more balanced view of world events to read a mixture of the largest international, english language, online news portals/papers which are not published in the US:
UK: Guardian
UK: The Independent
CA: The Globe and Mail (generally centrist), The National Post (generally right of center).
Not print media, but I find that the English language documentaries and news from DW are generally well balanced. They're certainly a lot closer to the CBC than they are to fox, msnbc, NBC, etc.
Their editor despises group think so you will always find dissenting and differing viewpoints as well as excellent reporting to the standard you'd expect of one of the oldest still published Newspapers in the world.
Crucial to this was my decision to quit Twitter. I became significantly less anxious after leaving. It's impossible to avoid the constant bombardment of 'news' on that service.
I bought a subscription of Die Zeit by mistake one year ago. It arrives by post every Thursday and I'm always surprised by the quality of the articles (even if my German isn't that good). Compared to the online counterparts, they are deep and even present several points and vision of the same subject. The best example was a article where they divided the page in two columns, and two different authors explained their points about the immigration crisis.
Here's a great example of subtle media bias in mainstream print media from today.
The Washington Post just emailed an alert about the FL legislature's passage of SB 7026, the gun bill in response to the Douglas HS shooting:
"Defying NRA, Florida legislature passes new rules to impose waiting period, raise purchasing age for long guns
The Florida House bill imposes a three-day waiting period for most purchases of long guns and raises the minimum age for purchasing those weapons to 21... The response to the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 dead signaled a major shift for a state known as a legal laboratory for gun rights activists. It could become a blueprint for other states looking at new measures to address mass shootings."
Now, that spin would have you believe that this was a major Democrat victory and an NRA defeat.
In reality, the bill was watered down to near-meaninglessness and actually passed with Republican support and over Democrat opposition. All but 3 Democrat senators opposed it. 31 of 41 Democrat House members opposed it. None of that critical detail enters the WP narrative at all.
I started getting WSJ April last year and read it everyday now. Saves me a lot of time and got me back into reading books, set a target of 24 for the year.
For well over a decade I read the Economist cover to cover, every week, during my commute. At some point I started working from home and dropped the habit, and took up reading the NYT on-app when my commute resumed. The NYT apps all suck, IMO, because they do not reflect the print paper. The WSJ, however, has the print paper in digital form and I like it much better, but do not care for their spin and analysis. I found the Economist's take on the news to be somewhere between these two local New York papers and preferred it, but the digital version for whatever reason left me nonplussed.
I wonder if there is a US news weekly akin to the Economist, with a good mix of news and analysis, with a well defined bias/opinion so that you're not left guessing what their perspective/slant is.
>I wonder if there is a US news weekly akin to the Economist, with a good mix of news and analysis,
Not really. There used to be the weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report). Time is still hanging in there. But it's a pale shadow of its former self and was never either as deep or as broad as the Economist is.
I've done similar experiments with tweaking my media diet. I haven't found something that seems right, but I have determined a couple things that I want.
My ideal news source would:
1. Not be speculative. I want to know what happened and what it meant/means, not what it might mean, or what might happen next.
2. Not involve PR people. I already know exactly what they're going to say, and why they're going to say it, they've brought me no value. Bring me either the newsmaker themselves, or someone who has at least the _possibility_ of being neutral-ish.
3. Never auto-play anything or force me to dismiss an add. Yay print on that front. :-)
I honestly enjoy Axios as a starter for news. They are relatively unbiased, gives me what I need to know, and tells me why it's important. If something has peaked my interest more, I'll turn towards WaPo, NYT, etc for further in depth analysis. Have you looked at Axios before?
After the latest election, I got seriously disillusioned by how the media had covered political issues. I constantly had a very different reading on what was actually was said by the politicians and I couldn't understand why people were so surprised that Trump would win I felt like I was living on another planet.
It seemed to me that he was the only person besides Sanders and a few others who addressed the issues that people cared about and being a socially liberal and fiscally conservative who actually liked Obama and Clinton a lot, it really surprised me how little I agreed with the Hillary campaign and the issues she ran on.
I realized that if I felt so different from I would normally have considered my political position maybe a lot of other things I took for granted claimed by the normal media I followed, maybe I wasn't being feed the whole story.
So I stopped relying on the news both online, tv and newspapers on anything other than the most basic description of the events and instead started digging into the "other side" i.e. the alt-right and conservative issues in general.
I had heard about Milo, Ben Shapiro, Breitbart and other people was was described as right-wing and never had really looked into what they were saying.
So I started digging in started to listen to what they actually had to say and to by big surprise I realized that I was actually agreeing with a lot of the things they said and that they certaintly weren't the evil racist right wing people they were being portrayed as. In fact they were actually often hated by the real right-wing. One of the most informative things was to listen to Dave Rubins Show which invites a lot of different people in and actually hear them out and make their cases.
I have never been much of a political ideologist and always found that I agreed/disagreed with a lot of different people with a lot of different political backgrounds and never really could find my political shelf now I realize that it's because I never really questioned just how big the bias of most newspapers, tv-news and online media really is.
My advice is drop the online news, the paper news and the TV news, start actually learning about the issues that you care about from the people who have thought about it most which I can assure you isn't the modern journalists.
When I was in grad school the college gave people newspapers to read. So for a few years I read USA Today and the NY Times regularly. There is no way I would ever pay for a newspaper subscription.
Most times there was nothing in them I cared about or hadn't heard about. Why should I pay for a sports section when I don't care about sports? Why should I pay for an arts section in the NY Times that is all about plays and events that are only playing in New York which is several hundred miles away?
Bundling is a form of risk management in which a publisher bets that the collective value of a bundle will be of greater interest to a large population than any disaggregated set. There are problems when certain portions of that bundle dominate the product, and are not what you care for (sport being a disinterest you and I share). Worse if sport intrudes other sections of the production -- I'm familiar with a print source in which it may be found on the front page, multiple times within the front section, periodically on the Op Ed pages (though those are otherwise almost wholly lacking in interest or information already), business, real estate, entertainment, ....
I'd be happy if it were simply restricted to one section which I could then discard with no regrets.
Your criticism of the Times's culture coverage is one I share. I've strongly suggested that at the least a regional substitute be offered such that local offerings elsewhere within the US -- say, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle -- be offered print subscribers in those areas.
The Times is close to being a reasonable alternative to any local publication, though this also poses concerns....
The news in general is so awful these days. It's gotten to the point where I rarely read the comments section because I already know exactly what the majority of the audience's opinion is. I know what Rush Limbaugh's audience thinks before I read it, and I know what WaPo's audience thinks before I read it. That's evidence of a pretty serious herd mentality.
The online world can be (and quite often is) an extraordinarily bad information source, and compounds numerous limited-attention dynamics.
At the same time, both print and broadcast media sources seem to be markedly worse, even the "best" of these. I find numerous national broadcasters (BBC, CBC, Australian ABC, PBS, NPR) almost completely unlistenable, despite decades of previous exposure. I'm not sure if they're getting markedly worse, or my own discernment has changed, though I suspect bits of both.
Some print sources are reasonably good, and The Economist, the Financial Times, and The New York Times are better than most. Many other print sources are execrably bad: Time Magazine, Newsweek, and the print dailies of most major U.S. cities, or papers such as USA Today. They are irrelevant, uninformative, distracting, and information-poor. They're not notably prone to yellow-journalism incitement, which is almost worse: they're both bad AND uninteresting. Print is no guarantee of quality, only of delay.
My preferred sources:
Long-form media programmes. On the Media (WNYC), Fresh Air (WHHY), The World (WBUR), and Paul Kennedy's Ideas (CBC) are my regular beat. With the exception of The World (a news magazine), each typically offers longer-form presentation, with 1-4 segments per hour, or roughly 10-15 minutes of treatment on a topic, minimum. Many are weekly, which required discarding a great deal of information that doesn't fit the hour. Each is pre-recorded, which is to say, well edited.
That last point is a particular disappointment with the BBC and NPR news magazines particularly: as they've shifted from a generally pre-recorded (sometimes by several days, though often by only a few hours or even minutes) format to live, the glitches of live broadcast have imposed themselves rudely and distractingly. I particularly noted this during the Boston Marathon bombing coverage in which the BBC attempted to have live, on-the-street coverage of the manhunt, which ended up mostly being an on-the-air troubleshooting of low-quality audio conveying low-density information (largely zero or none). The product of the 1990s may have sacrificed a slight bit of timeliness, but was vastly more relevant, prepared, and polished.
OTM's look at the alt-right and racism, this past week, was a particularly excellent instance and an exemplar of the class.
Books. There are materials which are simply best obtained from domain experts who've had months, or years, or decades to digest and present a concept. Oddly enough, there's a counterpoint to haw fast-moving present events are in that the timeless and ageless themes seem more important.
Wikipedia. For long-developing and complex stories, it is vastly superior in information delivery to a daily broadcast or print format, or even a weekly digest.
Selected online sources. Hewing to high-quality, and away from anything in the least sensationalistic. I add crap sources to my router's blocklist with impunity.
Disconnecting. Mostly I actively go out of my way to avoid ongoing distraction. I'm managing to remain reasonably informed, though that may of course be my own confirmation biases showing.
I didn't downvote — and talking about downvotes just invites more — but the faux-quote summary you provide in your comment is inaccurate. A more accurate summary, provided in the article, is "Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social."
The author explicitly rejects the claim you are imputing to him: "You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news."
The whole article, as I understood it, was about the deeper understanding you can gain about a situation if you take things slow, in batches, instead of seeking to read and post shallow reactions quickly.
>The author explicitly rejects the claim you are imputing to him: "You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news."
This isn't really pushed until the very end of the article, and it's not nearly as long as the rest. It feels very much like an inclusion mostly to appear unbiased.
>A more accurate summary, provided in the article, is "Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social."
I agree with this sentiment overall. Though, that is a quote the author of the column is echoing from someone else. Doesn't change that it's good advice, of course.
My point is, they didn't use it like a literal quote, they did the reddit style "> (faux summary of something)", which people on HN probably find grating.
People are downvoting you because they disagree with you. This is not against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), whereas commenting on it is. You are punished for difference of opinion and you can't complain about it.
I get my news online by scanning CNN, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC. I view ALL news as being biased (online or print) and by looking at several sources I figure that the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
Some other benefits of printed news (even if still biased): the ads in print stay where they are. They don't hover over the article I'm trying to read and force the reader to click 'X'. They don't start playing video clips. They don't have ads switching in and out and moving around. Print also has no way of tracking what I read.