Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

News organisations pander to their audience, so I think it's really important to understand what that audience is. If you happen to be in that target audience, then of course there's a real risk you'll end up in an echo chamber that becomes increasingly far away from anything resembling a consensus reality.

I've come up with several strategies to try and minimise this. One is to read multiple sources with different target audiences. I occasionally read the Daily Mail (my mother gets it, don't judge) and the Guardian. My main source of general news is the BBC news site, but I also regularly read The Economist. From time to time I pop on to the Fox News site, partly to remind myself that the Daily Mail could actually be a lot worse. I listen to LBC in the car (A London based politics and current affairs talk radio show).

Genuine question - I'd be interested in how others approach this. Is my set of sources too skewed one way or another? Am I missing a decent balanced source, or should I add a credible source on any particular political leaning?

One underrated option is to just not read the news:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

Getting the news from "both sides" is just getting two bullshit spins on the same topic, but the truth isn't in the middle.

You can get "just the facts" from outlets like Reuters. You may find that this isn't really entertaining and that really you do consume news for other reasons than getting informed. You may recognize that you actually want "the spin", you want the emotional turmoil, the sensation.

From that perspective, consuming news is more like a consuming a drug: A guilty pleasure that should not be overindulged in.

For example, you can come to a very different centre point for "both sides" by just choosing which representatives you have for both sides. The centre point of the NYT and the Guardian is very different from the centre point of the Washington Post and Breitbart.

(See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window )

For UK sources, I'd suggest adding The Spectator. They're not perfect (some of their columnists strike me as fairly obvious shills), but overall I've found them the most intelligent right-of-centre source.

For the Americans reading, they have a US site too, might be worth checking out?

This is not true, the spectator is a very right wing newspaper which our current pm used to edit (who was undeniably on the right wing of our the Tory party, which if you run the numbers on voting must put him in the rightmost 20% of the country).

It’s probably well written though, the irony is that the right wing press is often externally funded, not intrinsically profitable, and so has more cash in the bank to maintain high production quality, if completely destroying any pretense of neutrality.

I don't think The Spectator claims to be neutral? Everyone knows that it's a right-leaning magazine and it doesn't pretend otherwise. I'd describe myself as centre-left but I agree with GP that The Spectator is one of the better sources for a right-of-centre perspective. (I also agree with GP that there are exceptions... God I can't stand James Delingpole.)

Just because a source has an editorial slant doesn't mean it doesn't provide any insight. The problem is when journalists push their opinions on you while pretending to be impartial.

The Spectator is not only profitable (rare amongst newspapers) but has seen a surge in subscriptions. It's given back its COVID support money from the government.

It's actually the left wing papers that tend to lose money, as they're reluctant to go behind a paywall. They prioritise influence over profits. The Guardian is the clearest case of this.

Most news is worthless. What's important will have more perspective available six months from now (or, better, six years from now); what's not important is just parlor room gossip.

Reading e.g. the politics section of the NYT religiously for the past couple years, your biggest takeaway would be that Trump is an idiot who doesn't belong in office. Which, as far as it goes, is true, but there's no need to pick up a bad habit like reading the NYT in order to know that.

It's probably necessary to know enough about this week's going-ons for social reasons, to the same extent that it's necessary to know who's playing in the Super Bowl, but there are more useful ways to spend your energies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com