Where can I get unbiased news? | Hacker News Reader

Where can I get unbiased news?

thegatesnotes.com

28 pointsbootload47 comments

There is no such thing as unbiased news. What you want instead is the Hunter S. Thompson model where the journalist makes their opinion clear and upfront. Then, you can judge the rest of their reporting yourself. A lot of journalism majors I know try to pretend their unbiased, but that isn't how humans work. Say it upfront like programmers do ("First of all I have to admit I use Lisp/Python/Whatever but here is what I don't like about Ruby 1.9 blah blah")

edit: typos

Actually, before Sulzberger took over the NYT, the Times was the gold standard in objective reporting. I loved it back then.

You were reading the NY Times before 1935? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hays_Sulzberger

Jokes aside, NY Times has never been unbiased. Try reading the Power Broker.

Spot on. A story can present totally objective facts, but it will still be biased because the reporter decided which facts to include and which to omit. Likewise, reporters choose which experts they want to quote in their stories.

A friend's project: http://fairspin.org/ tries to expose some bias issues. Perhaps interesting in this context?

Objectivity may be an unreachable goal, but it doesn't mean that journalists shouldn't aim for it. The Hunter Thompson model also includes making stuff up - I'd very much prefer a story that tries to be unbiased, even if it fails, to a story that's written completely from the point of the writer's personal affiliations. It can be great literature, but it's not reporting.

"Scientific American" is a sad shadow of it's former self. It has gone mass market and PC.It used to be closer to one step below a peer revue scientific journal.

This is also true for New Scientist, which has really gone down hill over the past few years.

The front sections of Science and Nature are pretty good for general science news. Science News might be another option, but I haven't read it in several years and have no idea if it's even still being published.

What do you guys think of Seed magazine? I've seen the ads for it a million times on ScienceBlogs, but never gotten a subscription.

I read "American Scientist," which because of the similar name is confusing, but the content is more rigorous.

http://www.americanscientist.org/

It would be helpful to have some science background in reading it, but most here hopefully have that.

I can't vouch for the site itself one way or another, I get it in dead-tree form.

In my opinion: The Daily Show and/or Colbert Report. I guess you could say their only bias is toward comedic pessimism. Is it sad to say that a comedy network has become what I believe to be the least biased news? Or is it just our modern evolution of what has always been the place of good satire: to criticize, under the guise of comedy, that which "serious" outlets dare not discuss?

Perhaps, then, this whole discussion is moot, for as Stephen Colbert would have it, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Aside from not really being news, it's hardly unbiased. Perhaps the real issue is that there is no such thing as unbiased.

Personally I read The Economist and subscribe to a bunch of sections on news.google.com. In the end you have to make up your own mind.

Good point. I made the classic mistake of forgetting to correct for my own bias :). That said, I at least appreciate that they make fun of the parties on both the left and right, which are more and more becoming paradies of themselves rather than collections of reasonable human beings interested in debate and compromise. However I think the most important point is exactly what you and several other people have said: get lots of input and make up your own mind. I'm not sure how many people are interested in doing the legwork though...

>Is it sad to say that a comedy network has become what I believe to be the least biased news?

Both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report are very biased, by their own account. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but they can't really be seen as unbiased.

Personally, I think the rise of comedy news shows isn't a good thing. Stewart & Colbert's first commitment is to entertainment, and they choose stories that are good comic material, not ones that are necessarily important.

I always thought people who were looking for unbiased news were actually look for news that matched their own bias. I know I read certain publications/sites because I am more likely to read an article that presents a series of facts couched in a (tone|bias|opinion) that agrees with mine.

Plus "unbiased" is really hard. It's been in the 40's (F) in San Francisco today, the online paper (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/as/qr?scope=term&sourc...) has had headlines talking about how cold and rainy its been. In this case "cold and rainy" is biased, many people would consider our weather recently pleasant and balmy. That makes the chronicle biased, but not necessarily not worth reading.

See, I'm not the only one who thinks weather news in the Chronicle is biased - http://bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/what-kind-of-wea...

I'm surprised The Atlantic didn't make it on that list. I always see it mentioned in the same breath as the other sources and have found most of the articles fairly unbiased and interesting.

There is always some form of bias in reporting of news. Journalists are people so no matter how hard they try to be balanced there will be some degree of slant. There is a difference between slant and bias. Bias is trying to fit the facts to the story, not the other way around. So how do you check for bias and misinformation? What about choosing what you consider to be unbiased news sources, "news you can trust?" This isn't enough you also have develop a contrary viewpoint. [0]

How?

I read a Sciam article yesterday [1] that outlined a few hints. Misinformation, is opinion presented as fact reported as news. See if you can spot the following techniques used reading or listening to your "unbiased" news:

  - lack of evidence
  - use of supporting imagery
  - repetition
  - framing 
  - entertainment & fear

When searching for unbiased news I source from many sources: print; radio; tv; web; Favouring depth to breadth and keep my eyes shut to deceptive images.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrarian

[1] "How Effective Are Misinformation Campaigns to Manipulate Public Opinion?" ~ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=misinformat...

Interesting to see where Bill goes for news. I may not be Bill Gates (I certainly don't have his bank balance), but people interested in unbiased news should check out the "No Agenda" podcast at http://noagendashow.com

Dvorak and Curry may not be everyones taste, but they do point out many instances of mainstream media fail

Slate.com is my ultimate procrastination tool - I intentionally haven't bookmarked it, so I only go there when I'm really bored and remember to (ie, a few times a week). As such, I've always seen it as a guilty pleasure.

Now I know that Bill Gates hangs out there ... well, that doesn't really change anything in my life. But I'm ever-so-slightly more smug.

Weirdly, it was owned by Microsoft until not too long ago.

You should read biased news sources, only they should include those that espouse the opposite of your preferred bias. If you're left-leaning, keeping up to date with Fox News is like doing unit testing on your belief system. Likewise if you're right leaning but can put up with Jon Stewart (yeah, I'll go there and call him a news source).

Really? There are no unbiased media sources. Bill Gates of all people should recognize that every publication he mentioned is biased and be aware of, and mention, their perspective. I read some of these publications, but I'm at least cognizant of their leanings and know where to go for an alternative point of view.

The Economist is great if you want the Keynesian perspective on economics and not much else. Per wikipedia: According to former editor Bill Emmott, "the Economist's philosophy has always been liberal, not conservative." The bias is clearly stated.

Scientific American is purely mainstream science. It represents the cathedral of academia.

Slate - Do they even try to be non-biased? Again, wikipedia also describes it as liberal.

NYT/WP/FT/WSJ - No comment. Anyone who has read them can form their own opinions.

How is the economist Keynesian?

This isn't definitive, but search economist.com using Google for the following:

Keynes - 1640 results

Adam Smith || John Stuart Mill (classical economics) - 992

Hayek || Milton Friedman (Chicago school economics) - 858

Mises (Austrian economics) - 431

Of course it's better to read it and form an opinion from the actual content for yourself but I think these results are fairly indicative.

You realize, of course, if I ran a website criticizing something it would show a lot of hits for that thing right? Quantity alone doesn't tell us much here.

Sure, which is why I qualified those results by saying they're not definitive. I have read The Economist, come to my own conclusions (that the publication is strongly Keynesian) and thought it would be interesting to see if that bias showed up in a simple search for Keynes' name. Turns out it did.

> Really? There are no unbiased media sources. Bill Gates of all people should recognize that [...]

I read that conversation as:

  Q: Which sources are unbiased?
  A: Well, these are the sources I go to...

If you think the Economist is primarily about economics, then you clearly haven't read it. It is the best way to keep up on world affairs with an international perspective.

The Economist certainly has a point of view, which is clearly stated in the opinion "Leaders" at the front of each issue.

However, that point of view is not liberal in the sense that Democrat = liberal, Republican = conservative. They are liberal in the sense of Liberalism. They are not aligned with Democratic party at all.

If you doubt that, their presidential endorsements should make it clear. They endorsed Clinton, Dole, Bush, Kerry, and Obama. All while consistently sticking to their clear world view, which is well worth checking out.

One of the features we offer at Broadersheet that I'm really proud of is that we can offer "all the sides" of an article to our readers. We can show you the same article from a number of sources.

It's live right now, and I've been sketching up some pretty mad stuff influenced partly by what ^joshu worked on: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/delicious-upcoming-foun...

Really interested in what people think of this feat. Useful?

For current events I follow thedailybeast.com. The comments are filled with trolls though.

You better hope that you don't typo that while your boss is in the room. ;-)

Does not exist as a single source. Try news sites with diametrically opposed points of view and draw your own conclusions.

I upvoted because at its core, the plurality approach is a fundamentally good idea. However, two caveats. First, beliefs aren't on a spectrum, so get several opinions, not just two. Second, diametrically imposed still shouldn't mean extremist; you'll get higher signal:noise ratio in more moderate sources.

Of course - trying to line up in the middle of two viewpoints can have issues itself. ( http://xkcd.com/690/ )

Possibly the trick is to discard the outliers first.

That doesn't work either. One, there's the assumption that you're two opposed news sites are "really" opposed. Are Fox News and MSNBC diametrically opposed? Amy Goodman would disagree. I could also read the Socialist Worker Magazine and the American Enterprise Institute's newsletter, but I don't know what conclusions I would draw.

The issue isn't that all media organizations are biased, it's really that I am biased. I think the world exists in a certain way and the news that doesn't agree with that or fails to convince me to change the way I think, well then that news source is clearly biased.

You can't.

You have to read widely and deeply, correcting for bias as you learn to spot it.

For me the ultimate criterion is the degree of quality investigative journalism.

Congruent with that is the avoidance of sound bites.

For what definition of unbiased?

News are always biased. Facts are the only ones that can, potentially, be without bias.

stratfor.com

You have to pay for the news, but it's meaty and not particularly partisan.

Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal both have a strong right-wing slant.

Maybe you're thinking of the Washington Times.

No, I am sure the OP was talking about the Post. The news coverage the sort of "inside the beltway" stuff you would expect from the local paper to a one-industry town, but the editorial board is pure neo-con.

Yup. In both cases it's the editorial board that drives the publication to the right. There are great articles in both pubs but you can't call either unbiased.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/18/froomkin/i...

And I've got some money.

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