They're not perfect, but it sure beats NYT.
If you want the optimal news coverage without needing to read a million sources - The Economist, Financial Times, WSJ and The Guardian.
They are not as forthcoming with their biases as it seems. They mainly set up their ideological oppositions as conservatives, but they in fact have a lot in common with them. This is especially true for foreign relations.
I'd be happy to see examples of articles that go against the Economists' editorial agenda in profound ways and that pertain to foreign policy.
If you want news coverage that is any good at all and you care about foreign affairs you absolutely have to include at least one and preferably two non-anglophone or non-western sources that preferably oppose each other.
A good barometer I have for journals as far as foreign policy is their coverage of the Iraq War before it began. As far as I can see the Economist published almost nothing opposing it, limiting themselves to surface-level reporting of anti-war arguments in the sole goal of defeating them.
I don't understand why you would limit yourself, if you had to choose 4 sources, to 4 centrist anglophone sources. It seems like a very biased media diet.
And how can 4 "centrist" sources be "very biased"? Isn't it literally the opposite?
Most major news sources in the world report in English too. So you can indeed read news from sources that aren't from culturally similar anglophone countries and instead are from anywhere in the world.
No, centrism isn’t the opposite of bias.
Centrism is a position toward which there can bias of any strength. Position of bias on a left/right (or any other ideological) axis and strength of bias or two orthogonal, continuous dimensions.
But in practice "centrist" news sources are far more likely to present multiple points of view -- e.g. a left and right one -- while "left" and "right" news sources generally do not.
But at a deeper level, centrism isn't really an ideology at all, in the way the left and right can be. You can be a hard-core leftist or you can be a hard-core conservative, but the idea of a "hard-core centrist" doesn't really exist.
So I'd argue centrism can be the opposite of bias in a very real way. It's about dropping bias towards ideologies, and treating issues in a practical balanced way.
No, in practice less strongly biased sources are more likely to present multiple points of view. Now, the same amount of variation can seem more diverse when you tend to bucket things into “left/right” binary categories, if the center of variation is near the point where you draw the line between buckets.
But that's an artifact of forcing things into binary buckets making a centrist outlet providing center-left to center-right views look more diverse than a right-wing publication providing center-right to far-right views.
Their latest issue literally has a massive article against vaccine nationalism. Their opposition to breaking of the Iranian deal.
> A good barometer I have for journals as far as foreign policy is their coverage of the Iraq War before it began
That's very arbitrary, considering that 18 years have passed. The Economist has changed hands and most of its staff.
> 4 centrist anglophone sources
4 sources that aren't radical, have clear motivation behind them. Money makes people write in a particular way, that is easy to gauge.
Also - why would I read insane crap on either side, my job isn't to read news all day.
Also, not specific enough. Which Iraq war? The one in 2000's? 90s? 80s?
>4 sources that aren't radical, have clear motivation behind them. Money makes people write in a particular way, that is easy to gauge.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Just because they have a bias that is for the status quo doesn't mean they are more or less right. As far as I'm concerned all I'm getting from this is "I agree with this ideological bias and I don't want to read anything else"
Anyways, it's your decision to subscribe to a biased news diet. You're not any better because of which bias you choose than someone who only reads Newsmax or CNN.
If your assessment is that anything that's not from the same ideology as these four sources is "insane crap", which it isn't, good points are being made by people of all political persuasions, then it's clear that you have created your own media echo chamber.
That said, the editorial stance of the Economist comes through extremely clearly in their writings and they are unabashedly economically liberal.
Your characterization of NYT as being less ideologically diverse really doesn't match my experience.
Your list is incredibly West focused and honestly not that ideologically diverse, with the Guardian I guess supposed to take the "left" position.
NYT has lost my subscription, after they just straight up started running exaggerated stories.
> Your list is incredibly West focused
I read in 4 languages, would you like some news sources in Russian, Lithuanian or Italian?
There's an adage in math modeling/statistics: all models are wrong, but some are useful.
Here, all newspapers are biased, but some are useful.
Unless there is some link between calculus and socialism that I have yet to discover