What news outlet/resource informs, and doesn't try to influence?

Discussion in 'Politics' started by wegs, Jun 24, 2019.

  1. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    I'm looking for a news outlet, either a network or online pub/website that offers information on various current events and political topics, but doesn't seek to influence towards one party side. Any suggestions?
     
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  3. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    does saturation count as "doesn't influence?"

    good luck trying to find a usa media site that doesn't have a picture of donald trumps face on the cover.
    then look to see if they have the same amount of Barak obamas face on their cover when Barak was president.

    donald trump is all close up head shots
    barak obama is body shots an very very few close up face pics.

    clearly shows the usa media is racist
    or is it just shock-jock looking for hater clicks race to the bottom media baiting civil unrest kinda style ?
    hhmm...
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The lefty bloggers and better informed extremists have no love of Party, and they tend to get their facts straight. So you could go with them. There are also foreign news outlets, like Al Jazeera, that employ reasonably competent journalists and do not favor any US Party per se.

    There are a variety of science magazines and journals that likewise get their facts straight - they don't cover some things might interest you, but what they do deal with you can put some confidence in. The problem is they make the Republican Party look like a bus full of evil clowns.

    Your basic problem, as far as not favoring one Party or another, is that you also want the news reported honestly and with facts checked - and if the source doesn't make the Republican Party and everything connected with it look especially bad, it isn't reporting the news honestly or checking its "facts". So how are you going to evaluate them for "seeking to influence"? Are you going to require they not make the Republican Party look especially bad? Then you won't be getting the news.
     
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  7. Bowser Namaste Valued Senior Member

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    Let me know when you find one.
     
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  8. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    I've never found one.
    I doubt that such a thing exists.
    However, perhaps much like getting warm water, turn on the hot and cold taps to blend to warm.
    also
    add in something from outside the usa.
     
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  9. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Al-Jazeera comes to mind.
     
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  10. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    ha I read your post here, after I posted. Agree about Al-Jazeera.

    I'd just like a news syndicate that doesn't favor either party, or if they do, they just seek to inform and not influence. Kind of like announcers of sporting events - they don't favor one team over the other, they just report the happenings of the event.
     
  11. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    us political media devise storys that polarise so they may activate their audience.
    things that do not play into those polarisations tend to be ignored by the wider viewers.
    political money influences business in the usa.
    businesses create political influence
    churches in the usa create political influence
    government administrational action is defined by polarized political motive and political motives drive influential administration.

    see how neatly climate and all ecology and wild life has been deliberately shifted into a political fringe polarisation.

    should government employees be criticising the media for them choosing to report on news items ?
    is that normal for a democratic society ?
     
  12. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    In this case, the sporting event includes one team that is disproportionately cheating, threatening the refs, trying to change the rules, and so forth.

    The events themselves "favor" one team over the other.

    At what point does simply reporting those events become "influence"?

    If honest reporting of US political news is what you want, the extreme lefty bloggers and science journals and competent foreign news outlets will serve you well (even the foreign operations of international news agencies). If you require that events be honestly and thoroughly reported in such a manner that they don't favor either of the major US political Parties, you are asking for the impossible.
     
  14. Beer w/Straw Transcendental Ignorance! Valued Senior Member

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  15. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I think the combination of most any news site and your brain

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    gives you what you are looking for. Opinion programs/editorials, etc. aren't the place to get straight new.

    Any news is slanted to a degree but if you (for instance) go to Google News you will see many stories from many different sources. You can control what sources Google shows so just eliminate the ones who seems too slanted and use your brain with the others.

    I agree Al-Jazeera is a good one to include along with The Guardian and the other mainstream news sources.

    If one says that Trump is thinking about starting a war with Iran and another says that Iran will and should defend themselves if Trump starts a war and another one says that Trump has little choice if anything else happens in that area...you can easily figure out what the news is and what the slant is.

    Actually, just reading the news and ignoring any opinions, gives you what you are looking for.
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    By observation, that doesn't work for most people. They don't have enough information to counterbalance the bothsides convention currently dominating all the major US media news sources, they don't have the expertise or the time to get it, and most are incapable of that level of mental discipline anyway.

    Meanwhile their memories, as well as their judgments, have been crippled by the incessant repetition of rightwing corporate propaganda in their daily environment - a technique that works even on those alert and aware of its employment.

    Journalism is hard, skilled, time consuming work. It's a profession. It takes years to learn. Most journalists specialize - they have to, to get good at their job. People can't do that kind of work for themselves.
    Very few people can do that, and even they will be drawn in occasionally by the American professionals. (The most effective deceptions are made of carefully edited and presented facts, and bullshit of course comprises facts and opinions and falsehoods indiscriminately - how is an uninformed person supposed to spot that?)
    Separating "news" from "opinions" - even where that is possible (it often is not) - requires the very information major US news sources do not provide.

    Advice: 1) Recognizing one's vulnerabilities, simply avoid sources caught dealing in deception (especially, these days, "bothsides" rhetoric and framing), limit one's exposure to their repetition, and thereby keep one's common sense uncorrupted for evaluating stuff that is presented with integrity and accountability by actual journalists or intellectuals in the first place - regardless of whether it is "opinion" or "influence" or not, it will provide more of the straight news you seek. It is much easier to separate news from opinions in honest reporting.
    2) Avoid video, doubt photography, rely on text. Get important stuff in writing - that way, the sequence of events is better preserved and much more easily revisited.
    3) Try to remember sequences of events, what happened as it happened. The Achilles heel of propaganda is that the world will not stay aligned with it over time - if you can remember what happened, if your memory hasn't been addled by the repetitive barrage, you have a big advantage when the propaganda changes as it must. (Text will help. Example: try revisiting the written media handling of the beginning months of the Iraq War, including the writing of those opposed to the war; compare with the recent standard media impression of the public discussion of that time. Startling, no?)
     
  17. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    e.g ...
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC_SportsTalk


    people who are employed to be liked to talk about sport without alienating people divided between 2 teams knowing one will lose and one will win...
    Vs
    people employed to give their personal opinion about political opposing sides to fire up activation of morals to create more viewers...

    2 completely different animals.

    most people do not want to decide for themselves
    they are indoctrinated to seek out other peoples opinion so they may choose the same as someone they feel emotionally or financially connected to.
    They seek out the person to try and attach a "like" to them and then adopt their morals and ethics.
     
  18. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I don't think that such a thing exists any longer, if it ever did.

    The closest the TV news comes is when they report on breaking news events like an airplane crash or something like that. When they are still telling you which airline's plane it was, where it crashed, whether there were any survivors, and the circumstances around the crash (did the pilot radio in, stuff like that). But a few hours in they start to exhaust everything that's known, and they start featuring pundits who opine about it and tell you what they think is important about it. I usually keep watching if the pundits are aeronautical engineers, pilots or operations people who can supply valuable technical background. The time to tune out is when they start to moralize what happened and start condemning, assigning blame and identifying good guys and bad guys. When the news starts to become moralized and veers away from straight reporting, I tune out.

    Then just scan the headlines occasionally to see if any new facts (as opposed to opinions) have emerged.

    Regarding political topics it's more difficult, since political topics are already moralized right out of the gate. Political news is all about visibly displaying one's faith and all about condemning sinners. Even choosing what constitutes a "current event" is oftentimes going to be a political decision. Then describing it will probably expose all kinds of biases.

    Concerning politics, CSPAN might come closest to a straight TV news outlet. But televising government hearings straight can be exceedingly boring.
     
    Last edited: Jun 30, 2019
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  19. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    It can be boring, but I might be the only person on earth who enjoys C-Span because I can make my own judgment. I don't want to hear ''Trump is amazing, isn't he?'' (per Fox News) or ''Trump is such an idiot, why does he use Twitter so much?'' (CNN) Either comment is trying to influence me, not inform me.

    So, Al-Jazeera and C-Span are the two sources that come to mind, so far.
     
  20. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I do too sometimes, depending on what's on it.

    I can't agree about Al-Jazeera. I'm skeptical about it and don't typically watch it. It comes out of Qatar, is owned by the Qatari government and promotes that government's line. So I don't have confidence that what it tells me hasn't been selected by its editors in hopes of shaping my views on some subject.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_and_state-sponsored_terrorism

    But that being said, it does probably represent one of the more distinctive news data points out there and might arguably play a valuable role in presenting an alternative point of view.

    As Seattle says, in the absence of a truly unbiased news source, perhaps the best we can do is seek out a wide variety of opinion.

    Frankly, I'm hugely skeptical about journalism in general. It's no longer primarily a vehicle for telling us what's happening, though that's the hook that they still use to get us to tune in. Journalism has become a way for journalists to tell other people what to think. Unfortunately, I don't believe that most journalists are qualified to do that, nor am I convinced that journalists' interests are my interests.

    And tell the truth, I have to admit that I like twitter. I look for twitter accounts belonging to individuals in the news, to various companies and agencies, and whatnot. The advantage there is that these people are communicating directly, not through the medium of self-appointed journalists who plant themselves between news events and me and decide what to show me and what spin they want to put on it. If news is breaking, the best information source on what's happening can be the twitter accounts of the local police, emergency services or whatever it happens to be. When the wildfires were burning here in California, I was all over CalFire. You often seen the same information being reported on cable news hours later. Websites are often good news sources too, but oftentimes they aren't updated as rapidly then things are happening quickly.

    Recently I've been avoiding politics on twitter and directing most of my attention to SpaceX, NASA, Elon Musk, various people who live near SpaceX's Boca Chica site and often photograph it and report on happenings there (usually before the conventional media picks up on it), the International Space Station's twitter page, Rocketlab and many things like that. (You can see where my interests have drifted, as evidenced on the other board.) There are also discussion boards and blogs populated by engineers and industry insiders that often break important (if specialized) news and provide exceedingly well informed commentary. All without any 'journalists' getting in the way.
     
    Last edited: Jun 30, 2019
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  21. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    ^^ I love Twitter. It’s unfiltered and coming from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.
     
  22. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Because who is responsible for what, who did or said what, when, and why, is not a matter of fact?
    You've been spun.
    The headlines?
    There are few ways to set oneself up for political manipulation more effective than that. Anyone capable of biasing your assessment of "opinion" vs "fact" - say by incessant repetition of weighted meme - will have you doing half the work of manipulating yourself: you'd be filtering your own media feed for them, biasing your own factual frame of evaluation, rewriting your own history.
    Compare the headlines with the content of most news reports, especially from the better sources (whose content is less easily summarized).
    And almost completely uninformative, without any actual news content - unless style, tone of voice, visual impressions, etc, are one's predominant concern. (And sometimes they are). Government hearings are often filtered, rigged, staged - a great deal of effort goes into avoiding accountability, obscuring context, etc.

    News includes meaning. Meaning derives from context - in time, in sequence, in place. This context includes matters of fact - facts are involved. But there are too many facts - "straight" reporting requires selecting from them, for key significance. That requires journalism, and is beyond the reach of most people - they don't have the time, resources, training, or ability.
    Journalists - actual journalists - aren't "self appointed" any more than anyone else is, and they are not the primary sources of spin.
    The corporate media manipulation businesses - which pay much better than journalism, these days - target journalism; they do not comprise it. You can measure their success by the increasing rarity of actual journalists appearing on TV.

    Meanwhile: You have just posted a Republican Party propaganda meme, as your own opinion. How do you suppose you were manipulated into doing that?
    Compare:
    On twitter you will find - unless you carefully and with lots of information (you got from somewhere, such as a journalist ) sort through the barrage - a primary source of spin;
    a pack of completely biased and agenda driven "pundits" opining about stuff and telling you what they think is important, often according to the advice of media pros, often in ignorance. Exactly what you claimed to want to avoid.
    - - - -
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Ten bucks says you can't.
    No insult. The quantity and intensity of effort required to make a competent journalist of oneself , in any area much less Washington government, is considerable - I'm just betting you have a reasonably normal life and haven't done it.

    CSPAN delivers almost no news, to most people. As with a traffic camera, one usually needs a lot of background info to have any idea of what's going on. Bridge out? Ball game? Rush hour? Bank robbers being apprehended?
    Trump, Ivanka, and many other such public or corporate figures, have paid staff writing and editing at least some of their twitter feed.
    Those who don't quite often are posting in ignorance, about matters outside their experience or education.
    You might want to check the teeth on that gift horse.
     

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