What are some good places to start getting acquainted with American politics in as unbiased a manner as possible?

all-knight-party@kbin.run to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 37 points –

What with the recent development in the supreme courts I'm feeling a necessity to do what I can with the time left, politically.

However, aside from the most rudimentary basic terms I am basically completely ignorant to all politics on a state and federal level, and while I'd love to sit here and self loathe for my idiocy of not learning before it was important I need to start catching up and figuring out what I should be voting on and why.

Of course I'm deathly afraid that indiscriminately googling will lead to me learning biased and compromised knowledge from sites that I don't even know are biased, ending up with a skewed and inaccurate understanding.

While I know I could still be led astray by you guys, I figured it better to ask somewhere like here than to just wander off into the internet, so can anybody help me and people like me to start getting equipped?

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The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.

The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.

This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.

The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”

None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.

* I’ve criticized MBFC & Ad Fontes before:

I appreciate the information provided. I'll look into it and keep a critical mind

Stop worrying about bias and start caring about reality. Judge every claim on the merit of the evidence presented for it. That's all there is to it, really.

You are right, but know that it can be hard for someone to judge claims.

And to answer OP: I'd say try to read qualitative, well established newspapers. They often have various overview articles and if you read articles from a couple of them then you should get a diverse view

In general, this is great advice. But have you seen the dreck that comes out of the nyt lately?

I just mean fundamentally understanding the way the law works from the bottom up, and trying to get a handle on the ramifications that may not be obvious when it comes to the things I can vote for, especially different government positions in local and federal.

I would hate to learn about this from a biased site that omits certain information or something so that I'm crippled in my understanding

To really do that you'd have to get a law degree. And every information source has some sort of bias. The way to go is look at stuff from a variety of sources.

I can understand that. So it seems I can find a subject that may be important, read articles from each side and be able to discern the truth from the differences between them all

The "truth" is often elusive. Of course there are objective facts that can be ascertained by empirical study. But many issues, especially in politics, are based in value judgements, so there isn't really an objective truth. However, if you go by the empirical facts, it's usually easy to see who is arguing in good faith and who isn't.

Politics is always biased. That's the point of it. There is no strictly objective reporting that has any meaning.

It might've been better to say that I wanted to learn information that would be presented by both sides

If you want to do it the hard way it's time to watch CSPAN, CSPAN2, and CSPAN3. It's the only way to see what Congress is doing straight from the horse's mouth.

Wikipedia. It tends to have excellent, neutral explanations of ongoing political stories.

As a plus, every article is written to be a complete picture (at low resolution) and so you don’t have to deal with the way regular news articles lack orienting stuff if they’re an “update on the situation” article.

Like if you haven’t been following something, wikipedia articles are written in a way that brings you up to speed from zero.

Whatever you do, think about what you read from the perspective of bettering the lives of people. If the policy or the people are saying things that come off as hateful or prejudiced, maybe that's what they're trying to accomplish.

I just finished listening to this. It feels like he embraces the bias, but shows that's is only as biased as the history we learn in school.