Where do you go on Lemmy for reliable news and politics?

Ohthereyouare@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 293 points –

I'm enjoying Lemmy so far, for the most part.

Everything here is pretty good save for the fact that all the news and politics I can find is dominated by the same few accounts.

Half or more of the accounts have a very clear agenda. They modify headlines. Lie. Spread disinformation. And generally are just extremely toxic groups.

It doesn't seem to be a secret here either. And moderators appear to have no interest in putting a stop to it.

So, where are you subbed to for reliable news and US/Global politics?

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More to the point: where does anybody go for any reliable news? It seems like most news is now using hyperbole to make it entertainment. We have old man Rupert to thank for basically destroying a respected profession. That's my 0.02 anyhow.

While not perfect AP and Reuters are ok. The news they report is honest but their shortcoming is what they don't report.

This is how I do it as well. In general, understanding the overall bias of each news organization is more important to keeping yourself informed. You can combat the echo chamber effect by knowing what the biases of each source is and using differing sourcing to try to get as complete a picture as you can.

I would add to your list to check BBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR if you're US focused.

I am curious war the bias of Reuters is?

As the original comment implied, AP News and Reuters are reasonably unbiased in reliable in terms of their coverage. They do have a US focus so a lot of the pieces need to be read through that specific lens. Sometimes the omission of information is just as important and what is included.

Those are pretty good examples. They are still not great places to go but they certainly suck a whole lot less than the others. Hell, even the weather is now being reported as entertainment.

I wish for AP to have RSS feeds, but they don't. I think they and Reuters are aome of the better outlets out there and I've been (re)discovering RSS lately, but AP is one of the few news outlets that don't seem to support it :(

RSSbridge may have you covered there! They’ve got a bunch of instances running you can check!

Quite right, AP do have rss news feeds (rsshub is one - amongst others) - there are posts on lemmy related to this topic.

Interesting! I'm going to look into it, thanks!

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I find these two to be good for finding sources with different perspectives:

https://www.allsides.com/

https://ground.news/

After some time, you might see that there are a few specific sites that you like, and you can just start going to them directly.

+1 to Ground News. I browsed them with a free account for a short time before subscribing to the middle tier. Their tools are really terrific at getting me to look at multiple sides of the same stories, and the blind spot feature is fantastic. I've been very satisfied with it and go to it multiple times a day.

This is awesome, I'm going to check it out, thank you.

The Flipside is also excellent at providing balanced views and counterpoints. It’s a newsletter rather than a site though. (Full disclosure: that’s a referral link. I figured why not).

I’m also partial to The Week which also presents a wide array of views - though it admittedly leans left.

I've been getting flipside emails for a while now. I really like them.

AP and Reuters run the stories and everyone adds their opinions on top of that, or they rehash some Twitter thread. NPR tends to take those news stories and at least bring in competent analysts in to speak about them. I'd stick with those 3, for the most "fair" view of the happenings in the world.

I subscribe to WSJ, NYT, WAPO, and my local newspaper. You need to read all sides of a story in order to get a reliable take.

Also recommend: Memeorandum to see multiple sources to same story.

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Half or more of the accounts have a very clear agenda.

Everyone has an agenda; if this makes you uncomfortable, strengthen your critical thinking skills.

The desire for a neutral source is a desire to stop thinking critically about the information you consume.

Well said and yea if you find a "unbiased source" for news, you've only fallen for their bias.

Be critical even of what interests you, and read things you don't like as well.

This is just wrong as a general statement.

Across the world there are a lot of news sources that give their best to be neutral and objective.

After reading all the comments here I'm starting to realize that Lemmy is very jaded. Explains why things are such a mess maybe.

That's something that a lot of people miss, though: in many cases you can't be both neutral and objective. If one assessment of an issue is objectively true and the other is preposterous, neutrality itself is a subjective bias.

Non-exhaustive list of topics where a false equivalence neutrality actually distorts reality: climate change, evolution of the species; poverty and the roots thereof; racism and other discrimination; crime and the "justice" system in general.

Name one.

Reuters & Associated Press

They focus on America, as such have a broadly Western bias. Are they less biased than others? Probably. But you cannot report the news without some form of bias. The act of looking at an event and deciding what facts to include and what to leave out introduces some level of bias. As it is impossible to include every detail of an event, especially in text form, you’ll end up with a biased retelling

Almost all of the news sources around the world have news sites. I cannot keep up unless I only read those sites that have excellent reputations for being factual. Al Jazerra, BBC, The Guardian, the Independent, LeMonde, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washinton Post are on my political list. (Yes, it leans left). Credibility problem has made it harder to find right sources that I can trust.

My favorite lists are for STEM subjects. Facts, science and economics will shape how our world looks. Facts are the focus in this realm. If I only looked at Pulitzer Prize winners, I would have a good list

FWIW, my bias is our environment. Screwing that up makes most other biases moot.

You listed a bunch of neoliberal ideology reinforcing news sources and then said you lean left. If those are your news sources you're on the right my friend.

I was about to say the same thing. Imagine thinking that for example the cops and Israel apologists at NYT who used to have a regular column by BARI WEISS is left-leaning, let alone the WSJ! 🤦

The only one on their list that leans even slightly left is The Guardian and even they go full neoliberal sometimes.

My news sources have their slant, but are relatively factual and properly vetted. Pulitzer prizes and awards for journalistic excellence convince me of their quest for reporting truth. My quest is to find truth. My education was STEM and economics. I draw my own conclusions after seeing facts, but the blind spots in what I read are glaring. Even the better news sources largely miss reporting what is most important. The GINI index, global warming, why Farmers insurance quit Florida and parts of California, and absolute cluelessness of what we are doing in those policies are completely off their radar.

There is an adage that if you look at a person's spending, you see an honest picture of what their actual values are. I apply that as my strategy to cut through ideological BS.

Good on you sounds like you know where you're biased which is probably the best we can all hope for ourselves.

And the BBC (though I know there are some concerns about their UK coverage)

Ground news is pretty good.

I love ground news. But they just give you information on the bias of their sources, they aren’t unbiased themselves. You get a better picture but you are still getting it from biased sources

True. It’s interesting to read a right leaning perspective and a left leaning one of the same story though.

the theory that neutrality is objective is fucking mind numbing. the right wing reactionary perspective is never, has never been, and will never be grounded in anything resembling facts. they consistently disregard actual evidence to promote bigotry and divide the working class.

There’s a perfect example of that on my ground news widget today. It’s shows “blind spots” stories that the left and the right are under reporting. Todays under reported story by the left is “Tucker Carlson interviews Andrew Tate”. Of course the left aren’t reporting on these two cretins spreading their hatred. It’s not news, and it doesn’t deserve attention.

I would argue trying to find news on social media is the big mistake. It's absolutely bad on Lemmy, but it's not that much better on other platforms. Any story that isn't a "win" for the larger portion of people on the platform will naturally struggle to get attention.

There's a whole rabbit hole to go down in trying to find a way to get a solid, rounded and accurate view of current events, but imo step one should be to throw away social media as a news source. It's only popular because the algorithms on other platforms will tell people what they want to hear.

God damn that's a great point.

News is only remotely viable when done by a professional organization that at least tries to be impartial. You don't want your news to be filtered by upvotes at the end of the day. Never really considered that.

Yup, especially on sites like Reddit or Lemmy where voting exists. The news you see will be the news that agrees with the majority opinion of the site. This isn't inherently negative as long as one is aware of it, but it seems too many people are unaware of their own echo chambers.

Easy. Don't get your news from social media.

Get your news from Reuters or The AP or something. Come to social media to discuss the news but step 0 is go somewhere else.

People post links to those places here. That's what this person is asking.

Subscribe to a bunch of rss feeds you like on your phone

This is unhelpful, but... I just don't look at the news. If something actually important happens, I'll hear about it indirectly and go look it up if I care, but I've found that not being tapped into the news (and especially political news) all day every day does wonders for my mental health.

Same

If you don't read the news, you're uninformed. If you read the news, you're misinformed

Probably not what you want to hear but I've been absolutely bombarded with the right wing perspective my entire life and I'm pretty glad to have a place that doesn't try to both sides everything. Where do I get my news? Twitter mostly I come here if I want to see something discussed further

As others have said, you have to think critically about every piece of news you read. Ask yourself what the opposite side on a story might think, or look for an alternative opinion. If you're reading an article in The Economist, read an article in Le Monde Diplomatique on the same subject. If you're reading something about Russia in the Washington Post, read an article in RT on the same topic. Think critically, and the truth is likely somewhere between the two opposing points.

International mass media is a form of soft power for countries to exert influence. It's not a conspiracy it's a tool available to governments which is why you have the BBC, CGTN, RT, PressTV, CBC, etc. That the mass media in the USA is mostly private doesn't change that fact and make it more independent, because the USA is essentially an ogliopoly.

Did you apply your critical thinking to this answer?

If you did, I'm gonna have to advise you to take your own advice, since this answer in no way answers the question.

So, if I think critically, the truth is somewhere in the middle?

Apologies if I said something to invite your passive aggressive response. You do seem quite passively calling out a few accounts but won't mention them, I'm curious as to your politics now. Do you think it works like your neighborhood association where if you don't say the word that people will get it and it will protect you from revealing your bias?

You came here and explained a bunch of nonsense. That's why you got a passive aggressive response.

Your comment is not only jaded and wrong, but it's also not what I asked. You just came here to pontificate about your conspiracy theories about the media.

Which, for the record, is exactly sort of stuff this post was inspired by. Hyperbole and dribble. You didn't say anything of substance. You just talked down to me and rambled on about how nobody can trust the news. And that, is nonsense.

Replace the word "news" with "historical document" and OP is discussing how to conduct academic research.

Man, this whole thread has tried my patience. It's as if not a single Lemmy user thinks that current events are worth following.

I'm not sure where everyone is getting their information, but this response is sorta terrifying.

Current events are certainly worth following and Lemmy could be a great place to add comments, ask questions and find additional context. A bot to scrape a relevant subreddit if content is needed.

Complaining about bias is what I was addressing. You can get unbiased media. Al-jazeera is surprisingly good for world news.

Isn't Al-Jazeera a state-owned Saudi network? I'd trust them about as much as RT, Fox, CNN, or TikTok.

Qatar state owned. Yes. Expect bias for ME matters, but RoW it's mainly fact based.

Eh no thanks, I try to avoid getting my news from religious nuts lol. Good try, though.

I wasn't complaining about bias though. That's the thing. I was asking for reliable news aggregation on Lemmy. Big difference

Nobody here seems to understand that though. Or, very few.

I know news is bias. That isn't the point. It's the posting of blogs, YouTube videos, altering headlines, using alts to brigade voting and push an agenda... Here, on Lemmy, not in the media.

The media is a known commodity. If I read an MSN article, I know their bias. If I read a fox news article, I definitely know their bias.

A bunch of edgy "communists" and qanon accounts manipulating the large news and politics community ON LEMMY is the point. Not the news

You didn’t say anything of substance.

He actually did but your mind is rejecting it.

Nobody can trust the news. That's not nonsense, it's a fact. There are no reliable news sources.

You can either deal with it or pretend that the source you find most comforting is the absolute truth and totally unbiased. But then you'd be lying to yourself, which is usually what makes people get defensive 🤔

Your definition of the word fact is seriously questionable.

What is the news? How can you arrive at a definition of what constitutes the news without introducing bias?

Okay. Fine. So, what is the solution then?

Nobody should pay attention to anything? Where should I get my information? Should I visit all the people and ask them?

How am I going to find out what happened today at the NATO Summit? Should I have gone to Lithuania and attended the summit in person?

Is it alright if I read the article on NPR that explains what legislation past the Senate in the US? Or do I need to go visit the Senate myself so I can eliminate NPR's bias?

I'm very interested in science. Climate change and physics specifically. Where should I find out about the latest discoveries in science? Do I need to read all of the journals myself? Cuz, if so, I'm fucked. I don't have that sort of time.

And, admittedly, even though I consider myself well informed, I'm just not up to speed on all of the equations in astrophysics. So, now, I'm really fucked. Do I need to know a physicist personally so I can ask them?

I think we are just saying that whatever generic, non offensive form of media that you consume is also biased in ways that you can't quite perceive. You've encountered some alternative narratives on Lemmy and you regard them as biased without necessarily making the connection that your own news outlets and views are equally biased. It's easy to see bias in others but hard to see in yourself

What specifically do you want lemmy mods to "stop?" What kind of lies are they spreading? What do you consider disinformation. Complaining that your world view isn't being catered to is a lot less useful then pointing out specific things you find sus.

I read the Newsletters from NPR and Morning Brew. If something catches my eye, I'll look it up on ground.news then find something marked "center" to get more details.

But, isn't that sort of the point of Lemmy? Link aggregation?

I've been going to all the individual sites as well since leaving Reddit. But, only because the news and politics culture in Lemmy is so atrocious.

Despite its faults, Reddit did an okay job of moderation. It's a shit show here. The posts are all either bots or edgy 8th graders from troll communities. It's a mess.

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This doesn't ask your question, but this may be of useful to people, anyway.

I've just joined ground.news, a pay site. The great part about this site is that it rates news as to left, center, or right leaning, and rates the "factuality" of the sites. Filtering out non-factual knocks out a large part of the outlier's lies, and shows who the people are, who push them. like knowing the players pushing their agenda. One caveat is that some that push lies still slide through by quoting the people who spout lies without disclaimers of the reliabilty of their false claims. One rule of thumb that I find helpful is that I mentally filter out any pleas to emotionalism. Manipulating readers/viewers emotionally is the opposite of informing. Sites that try to be centrist and ignore whether the sources are reliable about facts, end up being half lies or propagandsa. It is useful to keep in mind that blatently propaganda sites work in some truth to give themselves some plausibility. Only the highest reliable news are worth letting in to your news sphere.

This is a worldwide problem as paid propagandaists muddy the news sphere. Welcome to our cyber warfare world.

I don't get my news from any social media platform, including lemmy, no offense to lemmy. I used to do that with reddit, but it's just too unhinged getting your news that way.

I stick with Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times, in that order. I also use Google News specifically for local news, but I don't even peek at the main world news feed there.

More generally speaking, I stick to the old school human editorial board for my news. News that's presented to me on AP, for example, has already been filtered by a board of humans who are smarter than me and whose opinions I trust on the state of the world. Opening up your selection of news to an easily gameable social media algorithm is just more trouble than it's worth, in my opinion.

Even the NYT has been pretty shady recently. Particularly in regards to their trans coverage. Here's the story from GLAAD and on NPR.

Sorry, I have to admit that I'm not the best at keeping up with LGBTQ+ news, so I wasn't aware of that controversy. I'll keep an eye on that and see how it shakes out. If NYT continues to stir controversy, then I can switch. I'm not particularly attached to them. Washington Post would be a good replacement, and I saw that GLAAD article mention that WP's LGBTQ+ coverage is better.

This is what I got: Some are more active than others.

Thanks for the list

Some of those are exactly the places I'm talking about. Politics@lemmy.ml is filled with accounts from troll farms. The #4 post there right now is by the worst of the group.

And, if it wasn't bad enough that post fake and misleading stuff, they brigade the votes and manipulate the posts that way as well. It's a disaster.

So far for me, the only place in the fediverse with news and politics communities that are okay but not great are the ones on beehaw.org.

Everywhere else I've checked so far has a very naked agenda. Beehaw still leans left, but not in a way that feels icky.

You are quite literally the only person that actually answered OPs question. Thanks for these!

I don't. Lemmy seems to have the same issue as Reddit where people are towards the extremes with the only moderate people being those who don't want to talk about politics in the first place.

I like to listen to CSPAN while at work, especially their morning show "The Washington Journal" where most of the content are regular Americans calling in to talk directly to guests or about issues they feel are important.

Good luck finding reliable news anywhere, this including the major TV and News organizations.

RSS to get a typical feed that people have become accustomed to. Set up RSS from sources you want to see then see. You get to see more instead of what individuals cherry picked for whatever reason.

This is the best way, for sure. And there are a lot of really great selfhosted projects for doing so!

Unbiased news is impossible. If someone is saying that he's giving you unbiased and objective news, he's scamming you.

I don't really use social media for that, to be honest. I just get info from my friends, but if I seek out news myself I'll usually just check the BBC, free news that has to be as impartial as possible. Maybe the Financial Times is alright too, but they paywall their articles and they're more intended for investors than the average person.

Where did you go on Reddit? The only place back there I really trusted was AskHistorians and 20 years ago is not really breaking news. Everywhere else I had to sort through crap for myself.

If you really want to understand the world, you'll actually have to study it.

Edit: It's interesting I still got upvotes, since OP correctly points out that wasn't well worded.

What I'm trying to say is that news with no bias is pretty much a unicorn, and one you can't identify at a glance. And I don't even mean just political bias, a lot of important stuff is boring or otherwise unsuitable for the news cycle. Adding a layer of social media people on top doesn't automatically make it better.

What does that even mean? If I want to understand the world I need to study it?

Lol, wtf? I'm looking for current events. What level of prerequisite historical knowledge would I need where I could bipass what is happening right now all over the world?

And shit... All of Reddit is bad except askhistorians? What?

So, if I understand you correctly, your advice is that I shouldn't trust news and I should study the world? What source should I use to study? Are all sources bias? I'm fucking confused

Clearly they're saying you should hop in a hot air balloon and travel around the world spotting breaking news with your own eyes.

That would be lit, but my point was more like "news varies from deliberate lies to true but necessarily skewed content". Reddit is a great way to get a mix of the whole spectrum with no context.

Yeah, okay, in hindsight that wasn't as elegant as I was hoping. More to come.

Edit:

This was about news in specific. Reddit's great if you want help with your electronics project, but for political analysis it's not so great. There's way, waaay too many people pushing something or other for reasons other than empirical correctness.

AskHistorians is moderated extremely tightly by PhDs and requires a source for everything, so it's about as good as it gets. I understand that's not what you asked for, but it's the closest thing I could think of. I'm honestly wondering what subreddit you were using for news - I feel like I've seen questionable discussion on all of them that I've encountered.

I also use things like r/UkrainianConflict for the latest news from that event - with the GIANT caveat that you have to understand the subject matter well enough to tell when OP is full of shit, or passing along shit. That one in particular is infested with people that think a nuclear first strike is a sane and justifiable tactic for NATO with no negative repercussions, which hopefully you can see is insane.

As for what you should study, pretty much all the social sciences help. If you can afford travel that's great, but that's not everyone and it's possible to fuck that up too. Occasionally knowing other sciences will help; like when someone tells you the sun is causing climate change.

News reading is just figuring out your real situation in a world full of liars both deliberate and accidental. You either dissect the lies yourself or you have to find someone you trust. Random Redditors aren't the right answer even if they can be part of the puzzle.

You should ask more questions and give less answers.

Oh, I ask plenty, too. Check my post history. I count 4 full posts in just the last month.

I'm sorry if I'm coming across as a know-it-all.

no such thing as reliable news sadly, except going outside

What about Reuters?

Reuters is known as the "reluctant imperialist" news source. They use neutral language as much as possible but still back British interests. Owned by a Canadian multinational.

Maybe it has to do with where I live (relatively dangerous US city) but I'd rather not see anything newsworthy when I go outside.

Lemmy and Reddit in general haven’t been good for reliable news for me. I’ve been using Artifact for the past few months to have a more personalized feed, but I much prefer picking my own RSS feeds.

The only thing that is lacking for me about RSS feeds is the ability to discuss content. If Lemmy can fill that void, I’ll gladly switch over.

I wouldn't rely too much on lemmy for news and politics tbh, because posts can sway on way or another or even not get traction because most people don't agree with it. Instead I think it's better something like a RSS feed where you can pick your sources, or maybe just check a couple of less biased news outlets, so you can somehow have a more broad overview of what's going from different perspectives.

I don't

I learned on Reddit not to trust any world news or political news posts. I was tricked a couple of times by fake posts. I still browse the posts, but I take everything I read with a grain of salt.

I use news apps for my news.

Try Reuters or AP. I’ve been trying out the Boring app too recently which takes the sensationalism out of articles

For international politics I watch and read news sources from India, they are somewhat biased against Pakistan (thou, I believe, even there are truthful) and for everything else looks quite neutral.

I don't think there is any reliable source for US politics, too much interests are in play and even if someone is truthful and reliable I don't know how to assess that. But I do take a look at Democracy Now since they don't sound sensationalistic.

As much as I hate YouTube advertisers, I like ground news a lot as an aggregator site.

An interesting project here on this front is lemmy.link: https://lemmy.link/communities

They create RSS feeds from external sources and dump the feeds into lemmy communities.

So it’s an RSS aggregator native to lemmy so that we can up/down vote and comment or cross post too.

Seems like an interesting way to take the arbitrariness out of what gets posted and instead focus on actually reading, assessing and commenting on the news.