Ask HN: What news sources do you use to maintain a broad perspective? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What news sources do you use to maintain a broad perspective?

23 pointsJadoJodo65 comments

I'm setting up my feed reader and wanted to get some perspectives on good, quality sources for news. In particular, I'm interested in good sources for US news, international news, and left-leaning sources. I lean conservative, so I've already identified several sources that lean in that direction, but I'm happy to hear more.

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I read daily :

Axios - good format that makes it easy to explore in as much depth as desired. As objective as anything I've seen ((understanding we are all human).

Guardian - avoid opinions columns. At times it gets too preachy even if I agree in principle so I read a bit of fox news monthly just to reset :->

Al Jazeera - increasingly find them more readable and detached than some more popular north American sources

I renew my Stratfor subscription every now and then.

As an American I find Al Jazeera indispensable. It's the only place I can get the context for things going on in the Middle East aside from friends who are from there.

I like the Economist. They don’t do breaking news, only a weekly roundup of the most important stuff. Often they’ll analyse broader trends that are missed by newspapers focussing on the latest breaking story.

For example, here's an article from 2011, titled "Print me a Stradivarius" (http://www.economist.com/node/18114327). If you were already familiar with 3D printing, the article might have struck you as elementary. But the vast majority of people don't work in tech, especially not in hardware tech. Such people almost certainly would not have heard of 3D printing in 2011, and learning about this would have been very valuable.

I trust them because they pass the Gel-Mann test. I’ve never seen them print something wrong about an area I know about, which is technology. Not saying they’re infallible, but they pass the test to the best of my knowledge.

They’re also careful to not assume expertise in any of the fields they cover. There might be an article about income/wealth inequality but they’ll only use Gini coefficient after explaining what it is.

But the reason I’m really fond of them is the obituaries section. Most times it’s someone you’ve never heard about but after you read it you’re glad you read it.

The economist and non fiction books. You will learn more about the world by reading about, rhetoric, linguistics, cognition, psychology, and history than you will from news, which is usually extremely transient and not important a few months after.

They can be pretty biased though. But good source of a lot of topics and being aware of bias helps since it can't really be eliminated.

I agree with other posts that national and international news is often just click bait designed to enrage. "If it bleeds it leads."

Local news however can be a different story. Don't get me wrong there's some awful stuff there too (lookin' at you Sinclair) but the things that truly affect you rarely happen at the national level. City council meetings, your local culture, hell how Covid is doing in your town ... all those things have a lot more effect on your life than almost anything at the national level.[0] Hell if your ad blocker is off you're even ostensibly helping local companies by viewing and clicking their ads.

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/why-does-loca...

Wikipedia's Portal Current Events

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

RSS: https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/current_events/

NPR, The Guardian, Ars Technica all lean reasonably left. I’d appreciate you sharing your more conservative news sources.

https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml

https://www.theguardian.com/world/rss

https://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index

WSJ, Daily Wire, Washington Post, HN (obvi), Twitter, Politico, NYPost are a few i like to use. I've found that following prominent people on particular niches on Twitter give more nuanced, intelligent takes than popular news headlines would lead you to suggest.

You might be interested to check one side project called Their News [0]. It's basically a way to check how different biases write about the same news. Data from this News API [1]

[0] https://www.their.news/

[1] https://newscatcherapi.com/news-api

68k news -- a plain-text HTML 1.1 google news clone: http://68k.news/

See the last HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26623362

Aaron Swartz: I hate the news.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

The even bigger take away from this is that he wrote this before he died in 2013. In the last ~8 years news had dramatically become worse.

I challenge all readers, on every subject verify they are telling the truth. You'll find the overwhelming supermajority of the time the news are wrong. The new thing that Aaron never saw, news outright publishing self-contradictory stories on purpose.

After you do this exercise, you find out the news is fraudulent. Why would you read something that is so fraudulant? Then again why would anyone get their news from the court jesters? The Daily show was just the court jester even in Aaron's time.

I like the daily email 1440, which provides a quick summary of the day's news, with links to a variety of news sources if you want more detail. https://join1440.com/

I'll have to give it a go! Thanks.

https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

https://www.readtangle.com/

Personally I like my news from different countries / cultures / languages to keep things in perspective.

No TV news, no moving pictures, just plain text.

I spend no more than about 15 / 30 minutes scanning / reading these sources in the morning and refrain from news for the next 23,5 hours.

It gives me enough input to be able to have water cooler exchanges without being agitated about issues I have absolutely no control over.

I work in content, so I need to know what’s going on at all times. I read the following news sites and aggregators every single day:

Forekast, trends24, Google Trends, Google Finance, Drudge, Slashdot, NYTimes (personal favorite and the only one I pay for), Digg, Reddit, Boing Boing, Engadget, Gizmodo, HN, NPR, 503 engineering blogs, Newsbreak (local news), Bogleheads, and Kottke.

Is Digg still alive? I looks like a click bait newspaper now.

Still alive and useful for tracking "meme" news, which sadly I do need to be aware of.

I use a site I built for this purpose - datente.com

I subscribe to feeds I agree with

And ones I don't

And ones that may (or may not) happen to have interesting items periodically

> datente.com

This is fascinating. I'll bookmark and revisit later. Thanks!

Sure thing :)

If you'd like to see what drives it (nothing too groundbreaking), I'm happy to share :)

Do you provide a RSS feed for this?

It's not [yet] republishing the subscribed feeds into an amalgamated one

You might like Breaking Points with Krystal Ball (yes that's her real name) and Saagar Enjeti - they're a left-leaning/right-leaning pair who cover current events from a populist anti-establishment perspective. As a result you get lots of takes about stories the mainstream media are neglecting. They're also both really smart. You might not agree with them (I don't necessarily) but it does make legacy media seem lame, boring, and corrupt by comparison.

https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints/videos

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-k...

I limit my news sources on purpose to avoid being overwhelmed. I limit myself to one international source and one local source. Then I have one video source. For me these are the BBC, Chicago Sun-Times, and PBS NewsHour. I used to follow tons of news sources but most are poor quality and just repost AP articles. For someone that drives a lot, NPR is a decent as well, but I find it inferior to the BBC. I don't consider any of these to be "left leaning", they're generally down the middle, but that depends on ones personal perspective. I used to caution people that if you watch the news too closely, you'd think the world is coming to and end. That was ten years ago. These days, you need to watch the news so you know when you're in your last week on Earth.

Summary sites that list "What the papers say" for your country of choice, e.g. for the UK the BBC "Newspaper headlines" [1] gives the front page of the major papers. It's pretty interesting to see how papers owned by the same parent company will present the same news with pretty much opposite takes on it.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-58591785

> It's pretty interesting to see how papers owned by the same parent company will present the same news with pretty much opposite takes on it.

Ideally you'd get this from the same paper, and not different papers in the same family.

CGTN: https://www.cgtn.com/world

Especially nowadays, when opinions hostile to China are bipartisan, it's important to see how they treat these topics from the other side

Also, TeleSur: https://www.telesurenglish.net/SubSecciones/en/news/world/in...

> Especially nowadays, when opinions hostile to China are bipartisan, it's important to see how they treat these topics from the other side

That logic is too simplistic. The "sides" aren't symmetrical and equivalent. CGTN is meant to be China's version of RT, it exists to further China's foreign propaganda goals, that doesn't include accurate and honest journalism when that would conflict with those goals.

CGTN banned from use on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CGTN

> China Global Television Network was deprecated in the 2020 RfC for publishing false or fabricated information. Many editors consider CGTN a propaganda outlet, and some editors express concern over CGTN's airing of forced confessions.

Telesur is also banned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

> Telesur was deprecated in the 2019 RfC, which showed consensus that the TV channel is a Bolivarian propaganda outlet. Many editors state that Telesur publishes false information. As a state-owned media network in a country with low press freedom, Telesur may be a primary source for the viewpoint of the Venezuelan government, although due weight should be considered. Telesur is biased or opinionated, and its statements should be attributed.

It seems you believe that BBC, Fox News and CNN don't push their own propaganda?

> It seems you believe that BBC, Fox News and CNN don't push their own propaganda?

Please.

First of all: One of those things is not like the other, one of those things just doesn't belong. Can you tell which one is not like the other, by the time we finish our song? (hint: Fox News, which is mostly opinion blowhards).

It's the difference between trying to get the story right trying to get the propaganda line right. Even if you think the BBC is propaganda, you won't balance it with even more blatant propaganda that's far less focused on being journalism (e.g. from a country where the media is managed like this: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/directives-from-the-mini..., or who puts banners on their buildings that say "the surname of the central television network is the party" (roughly translated)).

You asked for specifically left-leaning so I'll leave out all the usual wacko-right stuff. Most of this stuff is not left as in liberal, but is more left as in not right. Some of it is not news exactly, but content that is a barometer for where center and left thinking is trending. - Moon of Alabama - Glenn Greenwald - No Mercy / No Malice - Perception Indexed

I'd like to see your wacko-right content list, if you don't mind.

I make a habit of reading the headlines of at least three major news websites daily (Fox, CNN, NY Times), in addition to reading articles mostly on one. This doesn't mean I really know what's going on, but at least I know what people think is going on which seems to be as important these days. Oh, and of course HN.

The Guardian is great, also I think they still have a free full text feed (although I think donations are appreciated)

where can I find the full text feed?

- https://futurecrun.ch/

- the economist

- novels and non-fiction books

https://www.improvethenews.org/ This is pretty handy. Started by physicist Max Tegmark, it uses classifiers to show news based on different settings you can adjust (Political stance, depth, shelf-life etc.)

TheDispatch.com if you aren't already reading it.

I agree with other posters that it is better to read news after it is no longer new. We should wait a few days to judge things so they have had a chance to settle in.

I use memeorandum in my RSS. They gather all the different sites on a topic under 1 heading (ideally).

https://www.memeorandum.com/

Just don’t read the news: it’s an addictive consumer product developed to keep folks on all sides of the spectrum continuously in crisis mode.

Yes, I support this perspective. You will get the news anyway, whether you like it or not.

This perspective is a tiny bit exaggerated, but not by much. You don't need the vast majority of the news, especially not at the rate it's published. If it's important, it will get to you. If you really need to stay informed, maybe check things out once a week, after the stories have been developed.

Obligatory re-post of Aaron Swartz's blogpost: https://archive.md/KavvY

I also decided a while ago to quit reading the news everyday, partly inspired by Aaron's post. I no longer feel ashamed to be uninformed. Also, weird side-effect, but I find that I'm much more humble when engaging in political discussions with colleagues now and less inclined to go on a rant.

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”

~unknown

I agree with this, but I would place a larger emphasis on Breaking News being something one should actively avoid. Unless it's a 9/11-level event, or you are in imminent danger (which is highly unlikely), you don't need to know about it until the facts are out.

> Just don’t read the news: it’s an addictive consumer product developed to keep folks on all sides of the spectrum continuously in crisis mode.

You're painting with way too broad a brush. It's like saying the internet is just there to addict you so you click ads. Sure that's true if you only consider Facebook et al., but there's more to the internet than that.

It's better advice to avoid cable "news" and opinion columnists that align too strongly with your prejudices.

The news pages from high quality outlets like the AP, NYT, WSJ, etc. are fine, and there aren't really any good substitutes for them. Similarly, it's good to read opinions you disagree with, but it's maybe better to read someone with a "heterodox" opinion than hate read someone with an orthodox opinion from the "other side."

since you asked for "left leaning" and you are looking to have sources from all "sides", you should check out the New Republic and Mother Jones, in addition to mostly middle of the road picks like Washington Post (edit: yes and also The Guardian as someone else mentioned). I also highly recommend Talking Points Memo. Clearly not the HN user's cup of tea but that's what we libs are reading.

https://www.ft.com: love their depth. But would love more breadth in their reporting.

As an addition to your request, I'd recommend reading some philosophy. If you want left-leaning, you can jump straight in with Marx, Foucault, and Judith Butler (some of my favorites), but you don't really need to.

I'd just recommend this because the news is useless without a meta-understanding of its purpose in public opinion, ideology, and power. If you want to skip dense philosophy readings, just make sure to ask yourself, "Who benefits from the story being told?" Try to seek out a large variety of sources in respect to this answer. The reason that this is hard though, I'll personally leave to Marx and Goldman.

The Economist is the most honest and relatively unbiased news source I could find. They do explicitly lean towards classical liberalism, but the reporting still seems objective enough.

History books.

I often visit Fox News just to see what half of America is reading and it scares me every time.

For the public health/healthcare inclined, I like Kaiser Health News.

Associated Press

Agènce France Press

Reuters

They keep it real. They report, they don't speculate or opinionate on matters.

npr, csmonitor, axios, reuters, and primary sources.

Are you looking sources for the leftist side of the right wing ideology (centrism and politicall correct speach) or things from the socialdemocratic revolutionary left sparce represanted in media mostly sencored.

The Intercept

https://www.wsws.org/

https://www.zerohedge.com/

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/

cover a pretty broad "general" view to begin with. start there, and add from sources they tap, too.

I'm not familiar with the third link but the first two are prime wacko-left and wacko-right, and reality is unlikely to inhabit the midpoint.

The wider ones perspective, the greater chance of seeing some truth. Still not a big chance, mind you.

In the past I would have fully agreed with this idea in general, and it still has a ring of believability. But, there hasn’t ever been more evidence that this is not true when it comes to extreme politics than the last year. Getting more misinformation in your diet does not increase your chances of seeing any truth.

How can you get anything but misinformation? We can barely understand bits of the world around us, and our efforts to communicate that understanding to each other are imperfect to the point we're really just making noises at each other and hoping to stimulate similar thinking, at best.

Anybody who takes the effort to publish something; from the most respected journalist, rank government propaganda, and me writing this comment: all have reasons for expending that effort in addition to the "i want to share what i think is true", which we hope was the main reason.

We have to read everything with the filter of "why does this person want me to think this?"

"mis / dis / information" is a spectrum, and we have to see the shading in everything we consume.

Again, specious platitudes that I could agree with in general in an ideal world, but do not apply to extreme politics and disinformation campaigns. The difference between the journal “Nature” and Qanon is not “shading”. One genuinely intends to be true, and the other is purposely pushing information known to be false. One is open about it’s sources and methods, the other is not. One has a repeatable methodology, the other doesn’t. One puts their names on their publications, the other doesn’t. One is comfortable with subtlety and seeks truth, the other is a sales pitch that preys on fear and emotion. Suggesting they’re both shades of the same misinformation with the same flawed agendas and that you can’t get anything but misinformation ever is exactly what the most extreme right wing agenda wants; it has been systematically attacking public trust in science, and it’s working. This is precisely why ingesting it does not increase your chances of seeing truth, it only does damage and add FUD and confusion.

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