What media outlets can you consistently trust?

[Fergasun]

My tastes in media outlets are interesting.  Drudge because he is the fastest, with sirens (really, since 9/11 there is rarely breaking news) -- skip his non garbage. 

 

Political news HotAir (conservative slant, probably garbage).  

 

Then Karl Denninger's "Market Ticker", Yves Smith "Naked Capitalism" and Charles Hugh Smith's, "Of Two Minds".

 

I am convinced there is a "fake" political/cultural war concerned with left v. right -- and a real political cultural war of rich vs. poor.  Rich outlets push the left/right narrative to distract us from the fleecing of America happening right now.  

 

[s0crates]

16 hours ago, Fergasun said:

 

 

I am convinced there is a "fake" political/cultural war concerned with left v. right -- and a real political cultural war of rich vs. poor.  Rich outlets push the left/right narrative to distract us from the fleecing of America happening right now.  

 

 

I'm not familiar the media outlets you list, but I think what you say here is pretty much right. Divide et impera. Keep the little people fighting amongst themselves while the few make off with all the money. 

[TheGreatBuzz]

9 hours ago, tshile said:

Trigger safety is weird.

 

Sig will fire every time and is sturdy. They use the combat sight style by default and I think a lot of people pick them up, can't hit anything, and think they just don't like the gun. Just aim a bit higher it'll be OK

 

Sometimes they require a higher grain to not jam, doesn't like cheap stuff.

 

I'm not saying Sig isn't a great gun.  But for the money, and considering most of the people that carry a side arm won't use it, it's not worth the money to order in bulk for the military.  And they are more difficult to field strip and maintain.  I said glock as a cost/benefit case.

 

I'm surprised more people aren't just saying they're lazy and come here for news.  I let you guys do the leg work.

[justice98]

I think part of the problem is people can't or don't distinguish between news and opinion.  It's all lumped together.  There's very little news on news channels for example.  The proliferation of punditry on television or blogs and such should not be confused with actual news reporting.

 

You see it all the time in sports, where people think columnists and reporters are doing the same job.  

[ClaytoAli]

17 hours ago, skinsfan_1215 said:

http://m.imgur.com/gallery/iPLkz

Didn't see Bloomberg on the slide, that's my middle and Reuters to a degree.

 

BUT! Everyone outside of AP and maybe NPR should shift a bit more to the left.

[boobiemiles]

None in my opinion.  They pay to the perceived intelligence of their audience.  That is I feel they haven't gone hard n Trump over several areas of conflict of interest. They feel it's above their audience heads.  And that is not good for business.  So they go for sensationalism.  I hate Fox news because it utilize racial components to illustrate allegiance to a ultra right wing, conservative  audience.  They use labels like leftist, liberals, seldom use words like democrats or people. While Trump was crying foul about voters fraud, they had no coverage.  They back everything he does without any criticism at all.  

[No Excuses]

I am subscribed to the NYT and The Economist. No cable news for me since I cut the cord three years ago.

 

 

This is a neat infographic I came across a while back that I think categorizes most mainstream news well.

[Elessar78]

The Guardian. British/London-based paper but they run a good America game. 

[Renegade7]

I read Washington Post daily and listen to NPR on the way to work.  If I watch tv news, its Newshour (very underrated), but prefer reading the news over watching it (more facts then opinions that way).

[Major Harris]

18 hours ago, skinny21 said:

Via my wife, I listen to a lot of NPR.  Lots of good programming that does a good job presenting both sides (not just putting a moron on one side of the issue to sway influence the other way).  

 

I like Fareed Zakaria and Rachel Maddow - they often dive deeper into subjects, but I recognize the bias to some extent.

 

I love that John Oliver sometimes goes after the unsexy topics.  

 

 

same here.  i like npr for the most part, i just don't get how every npr voice sounds eerily similar.  it's like they all have one of those voice changing masks from star wars, only it's their own special npr sound.

 

 

i read the bbc (any way they can change that, that acronym has been co-opted in a not so subtle way)

[tshile]

2 hours ago, justice98 said:

I think part of the problem is people can't or don't distinguish between news and opinion.  It's all lumped together.  There's very little news on news channels for example.  The proliferation of punditry on television or blogs and such should not be confused with actual news reporting.

 

You see it all the time in sports, where people think columnists and reporters are doing the same job.  

That, and another problem is that that the main stream news media is very good at presenting a story but only with the facts that fit their desired narrative. Their lie is one of omission. So if you fact check what they said, sure it's true, and it seems credible. If you actually look in dept into the issue you'll find there are also other facts that are also true, which change what the total truth of the situation is.

 

For example:

If you look at US Debt in nominal figures you can write a narrative that is technically true.

If you look at US dept as a percentage of GDP, then that narrative is no longer true. At least not in the sense of honest analysis.

If you just neglect to tell people the flaws of looking at it through nominal figures, and why people normalize with a percentage of gdp, then you have an audience that doesn't understand why your narrative and facts are really not "True", but if you just go look up a chart of total US debt you'll go "see, they're telling the truth"

 

And that's a rather simplistic situation where anyone with an above average education should understand that, but there's a bulk of the country that would read what I just wrote and not understand what I said without looking up the terms...

 

If you step away and just observe them, they're really really good at this. It's become an art. When you realize the role they fill in society and the bull**** they create, it becomes frustrating.

 

Couple that with the ease with which they all throw around information simply citing "unnamed sources in $whatever" and you get this giant mess.

 

My favorite right now are sources in the "Intelligence Community". So overly vague. Are they retried/former workers? Are they consultants? Are then in an agency? Is it even an US agency/source?

 

Doesn't matter. They're just anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community. Tag your Tweet with "IC Source says" and now you've spread news throughout the internet. Wrong, right, lacking context, outright lie, gross over exaggeration? Doesn't matter. We don't have standards anymore. We just got to get it out there, if we get called out we can just apologize later. No one pays attention to retractions and apologies anyways.

 

Plus, you can always an forever fall back on: it's twitter, I didn't write an article, it was just a tweet, it's not intended to be news

(even though I use my twitter to spread news regularly because that's what gets you noticed these days)

 

That was the excuse used with the MLK bust removal "story"

 

 

[Malapropismic Depository]

22 hours ago, skinsfan_1215 said:

http://m.imgur.com/gallery/iPLkz

 

Anyone else shocked to see some of the names they have landed smack in the middle of the graph, as "minimal partisan bias" ?

[tshile]

not shocked. i agree with you, i don't think some of them belong there (especially since on the y axis they fall into the "meets high standards" category as well) but that is the general reputation they've been given.

 

it's hard to know exactly how they're grading. Are they counting Hannity into FoxNew's grade? If so, are they counting all of NPR's programming or are they just counting the "news" segments? If they're counting Hanity for FoxNew's grade, but not counting all of NPR's programming and only counting their "news" programming, is that fair and accurate? Are they counting the editorial board of the NY Times and Washington Post?
 

[tshile]

Heh... for example... The Guardian would appear to be, according to that chart, in the categories of:

Complex, Great in-depth source of news, Skews liberal (but still reputable)

 

They would be among the highest rated sources for news according to that chart. And, in my news reader today, is this:

 

ThreatPost -  Coalition of Cryptographers, Researchers Urge Guardian to Retract WhatsApp Story

 

Quote

A coalition of some of the globe’s top researchers and cryptographers are pleading with The Guardian to retract a story it published last week in which it suggested the encrypted messaging app WhatsApp contained a backdoor.

 

The article, citing research by Tobias Boelter, a cryptography and security researcher, accused WhatsApp of having a backdoor it that it or Facebook could use to eavesdrop on user messages. The article, published by the media group last Friday, was almost immediately met with criticism, first from WhatsApp – which called the allegations false – then from a collection of researchers who also refuted the claims.

 

The letter, written by Zeynep Tufekci, a writer and associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, calls The Guardian piece “reckless” and “uncontextualized,” and is recommending the paper retract the story and issue an apology.

....

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Joseph Bonneau and Erica Portnoy called The Guardian story sensational, adding that it was “inaccurate to the point of irresponsibility to call this behavior a backdoor.”

...

“You would have no problem understanding why ‘Vaccines Kill People’ would be a problem headline for a story, especially given the context of anti-vaccination movements,” Tufekci writes, “But your series of stories on WhatsApp does the same disservice and perpetrates a similar public health threat against secure communications.” A long – and growing – list of respected cryptographers, including Matthew D. Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, Bruce Schneier, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and Matt Blaze, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, have signed off on Tufekci’s letter. A slew of additional researchers, including Jonathan Zdziarski, Kenneth White, Steven Bellovin, and Katie Moussouris, to name a few, have also signed the letter pledging their support for better security reporting.

...

 

 

That's a complex, great in-depth source of news, that is reputable despite skewing liberal?

 

That's some pretty strong criticism for someone with that reputation. And it's from a well respected group of people.
 

Add: The Guardian has removed the term "back door" from its article, but has not issued an apology and has not retracted the article.

 

The damage has already been done. WhatsApp, through the fault of shoddy reporting, has suffered a reputation hit it'll never be able to recover from because there will be a subset of people that read the headline, switched to a competitor, and will never know the article was false.

 

This is the problem with reckless reporting. You can't undo it once you push it around the internet.

 

[PeterMP]

3 hours ago, tshile said:

That, and another problem is that that the main stream news media is very good at presenting a story but only with the facts that fit their desired narrative. Their lie is one of omission. So if you fact check what they said, sure it's true, and it seems credible. If you actually look in dept into the issue you'll find there are also other facts that are also true, which change what the total truth of the situation is.

 

For example:

If you look at US Debt in nominal figures you can write a narrative that is technically true.

If you look at US dept as a percentage of GDP, then that narrative is no longer true. At least not in the sense of honest analysis.

If you just neglect to tell people the flaws of looking at it through nominal figures, and why people normalize with a percentage of gdp, then you have an audience that doesn't understand why your narrative and facts are really not "True", but if you just go look up a chart of total US debt you'll go "see, they're telling the truth"

 

Saw this the other day:

 

http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/stop-the-presses-stop-the-presses-washington-post-decides-to-put-numbers-in-context

 

"They said it couldn't be done. It would be like the Pope converting to Islam, but the Washington Post did the impossible. It headlined an article on reports that Donald Trump wants to privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and eliminate altogether the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities:

 

"Trump reportedly wants to cut cultural programs that make up 0.02 percent of federal spending."

 

This is an incredible breakthrough. The Post has religiously followed a policy of reporting on the budget by using really big numbers that are virtually meaningless to the vast majority of their readers. One result is that people, including well-educated and liberal people, tend to grossly over-estimate the portion of the budget that goes to things like TANF (@ 0.4 percent), foreign aid (@ 0.7 percent), and food stamps (@1.8 percent).

 

The fact that it uses really big numbers rather than express these items in some context feeds the claims of right-wingers that we are being overtaxed to support these programs. It also contributes to the absurd belief that large numbers of people are not working but rather surviving comfortably on relatively meager benefits.

 

It's too bad it took getting Donald Trump in the White House to get the paper to do some serious budget reporting."

 

Though that would seem to go against the narrative that the Post leans left.  (I added the bold).

[Destino]

5 hours ago, No Excuses said:

I am subscribed to the NYT and The Economist. No cable news for me since I cut the cord three years ago.

 

 

This is a neat infographic I came across a while back that I think categorizes most mainstream news well.

Listing "Basic AF" as a increment for Journalistic Quality  

 

Speaking of that y axis, how is CNN at the bottom as "sensational or clickbait" but Huffington Post, MSNBC, and FOX News listed as meeting high standards?  That's absurd. 

 

 

 

[No Excuses]

1 hour ago, Destino said:

Listing "Basic AF" as a increment for Journalistic Quality  

 

Speaking of that y axis, how is CNN at the bottom as "sensational or clickbait" but Huffington Post, MSNBC, and FOX News listed as meeting high standards?  That's absurd. 

 

 

I think the Y axis is basically pointless. Should've just kept an X axis.

[NoCalMike]

At this point isn't cable news 90% commentary and 10% just news as in "a camera is following live and we are just repeating what we see"  If so, shouldn't they be disqualified in a report about "news" on basic principle?

[tshile]

59 minutes ago, NoCalMike said:

At this point isn't cable news 90% commentary and 10% just news as in "a camera is following live and we are just repeating what we see"  If so, shouldn't they be disqualified in a report about "news" on basic principle?

The EU does this.. and Fox News' EU division got slapped for this very thing.

 

I don't know exactly what the rules are... the only rule I'm aware of is that broadcast TV (the local stations that are literally broadcast over the air) are required to have news during certain hours and it's not allowed to be opinionated. I don't know if this applies to cable news networks, but I do know networks like FoxNews have programs that are "news" to statisfy the complain - Like Shepard Smith for example. Then they call the rest "opinion" shows to duck accusations of bias.

 

There's an interesting thought I recall reading once that where they fell short with the 'rules' was that they should have stipulated that during their "news" segments they are not allowed to have commercials. Get rid of targeting audiences for ad revenue purposes...

 

[drtdrums]

In my life I have to put in zero effort to get the leftist view (especially that brand peddled by people who say things like, "Reality has a leftist bias.") The information stream is pretty constant and most of my circle are both extremely vociferous and committed leftists. CNN is the most right leaning source they touch. 

 

I feed that through a series of conservative filters (National Review, a few writers here and there like Pascal Emmanuel Gobry, etc). I read Right commentary (Leftist commentary, again, I get for free) rather than Right news because it generally addresses the important issues and engages/corrects the intentional obfuscation of the left-filtered data I've already encountered. 

 

It works pretty well for me, but I'm sure mileage may vary. Feeding Left-skewed news through Right commentary means I get the facts + a sense of where the disputes lie. I highly recommend application of non-redundant filters in any information analysis, but I'm also a bit of a strange bird. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

 

[Corcaigh]

I own a t-shirt with the NPR logo. I don't have any other clothing with a news organization on it.

 

And two pundits shouting at each other should not be considered an outlet for news. In pro wrestling programs like WWE, they at least have the respect for the audience that they try and entertain by taking off their shirts, shaving unsightly body hair, and oiling up.

 

 

[Going Commando]

1 hour ago, No Excuses said:

 

I think the Y axis is basically pointless. Should've just kept an X axis.

It's necessary.  You need to be able to differentiate between high, middle, and low brow.  The Atlantic and NPR =/= CNN and your local TV station's news.

[Lombardi's_kid_brother]

They have problems, but if the New York Times and Washington Post ever go out of business, I honestly think the republic falls.

[s0crates]

1 hour ago, Lombardi's_kid_brother said:

They have problems, but if the New York Times and Washington Post ever go out of business, I honestly think the republic falls.

 

Here lately I think they are sharing in the blame for the fall of the republic. They spent last year propping up the only candidate that could lose to Donald Trump.

 

I know my opinion isn't shared by the majority of the tailgate, but I highly recommend the following essay. It is directly relevant to the conversation about the media, but more importantly, I think liberals would do well to pay attention to guys like Thomas Frank. The Dems just got wiped out at every level of government, a little self reflection might behoove them.

 

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/11/swat-team-2/

 

Quote

ESSAY — From the November 2016 issue

Swat Team

The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders, and real reform

By Thomas Frank

 

All politicians love to complain about the press. They complain for good reasons and bad. They cry over frivolous slights and legitimate inquiries alike. They moan about bias. They talk to friendlies only. They manipulate reporters and squirm their way out of questions. And this all makes perfect sense, because politicians and the press are, or used to be, natural enemies.

Conservative politicians have built their hostility toward the press into a full-blown theory of liberal media bias, a pseudosociology that is today the obsessive pursuit of certain nonprofit foundations, the subject matter of an annual crop of books, and the beating heart of a successful cable-news network. Donald Trump, the current leader of the right’s war against the media, hates this traditional foe so much that he banned a number of news outlets from attending his campaign events and has proposed measures to encourage more libel lawsuits. He does this even though he owes his prominence almost entirely to his career as a TV celebrity and to the news media’s morbid fascination with his glowering mug.

His Democratic opponent hates the press, too. Hillary Clinton may not have a general theory of right-wing media bias to fall back on, but she knows that she has been the subject of lurid journalistic speculation for decades. Back in the Nineties, she watched her husband’s presidency drown in an endless series of petty scandals and petty fake scandals, many of them featuring her as a kind of diabolical villainess, and to this day, she stays well clear of press conferences. She does this even though it was the passionate enthusiasm of the punditry that made her husband a real contender in 1992—and even though she has stayed close to several commentators who did exemplary pro-Clinton journalism back in those days.

My project in the pages that follow is to review the media’s attitude toward yet a third politician, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year. By examining this recent history, much of it already forgotten, I hope to rescue a number of worthwhile facts about the press’s attitude toward Sanders. Just as crucially, however, I intend to raise some larger questions about the politics of the media in this time of difficulty and transition (or, depending on your panic threshold, industry-wide apocalypse) for newspapers.

. . .

Perhaps it was the very particular media diet I was on in early 2016, which consisted of daily megadoses of the New York Times and the Washington Post and almost nothing else. Even so, I have never before seen the press take sides like they did this year, openly and even gleefully bad-mouthing candidates who did not meet with their approval.
. . .
 

 

[The Dude]

For all the right's reflexive hate of the New York Times, they are the outlet that broke the Hillary email story.  

 

That doesn't give the NYT any bonus points with the Breitbart crowd, however.