Hacker News Reader

Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of their propaganda or slant, these outlets are useful specifically because they are not part of the US media cycle "play list". US audiences are in a filter bubble. Also some of the domestic outlets are too busy reposting Vines to cover enough stories in between sports and weather.

Once encountering a story on those alternate sources, you can read with some critical thinking maybe, and then look for other sources to corroborate.

View on HN

You're trading one filter bubble for another. Unless you want to see how the population of another country experience propaganda, I don't see how it could be useful. You could do critical thinking on any source, not just alternates.

Well I mean I can't say anything to Russia Today but Al Jazeera for instance is often the only english language network with reporters on the ground in a lot of middle east situations.

This. It can be hard to get a non-US spin on middle eastern events, which is I regularly look to AJ and BBC. The value is in getting a different perspective, not completely unbiased reporting. Associated Press feeds can also be somewhat helpful: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/APNewsFeeds

Yep. There's whole different point of views to be seen. People are saying propaganda like it means only the caricaturization of propaganda(i.e.: overt), and, corollarily, like what is not overt is not propaganda or like it's "but ours is nicer/good". It's not like this, propaganda is everywhere. To me, anything that's not the pure facts plus context is the same as propaganda/ideology, there's only reality or propaganda/ideology, it's what I'm saying. If you want to approximate reality of stuff getting the different perspectives is absolutely mandatory. I guess that's too much work for most people, though.

Yes, and even when you are publishing pure facts, which is a good goal for journalists, there is still some editorial in which of many facts you choose to publish.

I agree, getting multiple perspectives on an issue can be extremely time-consuming and challenging. This site shares three different perspectives on current events in one place: http://pxw.news/whos-to-blame-for-the-iran-saudi-dispute/

Thats really interesting, thanks! I'll be following this one :)

Right, but if you take the union of sources you see more new stories total.

In order to do critical thinking on a subject, you first need to know that it exists. Alternate sources can be helpful with being alerted to stuff.

Although with Russia Today, it takes a pretty large effort to filter out the information from between the propaganda. Al Jazeera on the other hand has a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio.

Being able to approach things from many perspectives (even if those perspectives are highly biased, because there does not exist an unbiased perspective in human-gathered news) is very important.

I agree, but getting multiple perspectives on an issue can be extremely time-consuming and challenging. This site shares three different perspectives on current events in one place: http://pxw.news/whos-to-blame-for-the-iran-saudi-dispute/

Ever heard of "there's always three sides to every story"?

Apart from what the others replied(those networks will show stuff that isn't 'interesting' for some demographic), having the 'your' and 'mine' sides of the story is pretty much necessary to approximate the 'true' side.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com