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Comment by mprime1 | Hacker News Reader

If you’re looking for a ‘lean’ source of news (just the facts, no commentary) try Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

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Unfortunately, it is a mistake to think that just because you are only presented with high quality facts (statements that are very likely to be true), that you are getting an objective view of the story. You would be surprised how unrepresentative a story can be made purely through omission or selective emphasis, and Wikipedia is very guilty especially of the latter. The talk pages are usually very revealing of what the articles fails to mention, if you happen to catch them before the discussion gets archived.

This is something a lot of people don't understand.

It is impossible to have an objective and bias-free source of information, simply because the amount of information that exists is unimaginably enormous. It's impossible for any single human mind to absorb everything that's happening, so we have to rely on services whose job is filtering that information into a small set of important bits.

By selectively choosing which bits of information you share or emphasize, multiple different sources can all technically be telling the gods honest truth, while also all pushing completely contradictory narratives.

Everyone is pushing a narrative, and it's critical that we all try to understand the incentives of the pushers of information we ingest.

I learned this when I dated a law student while in college. They teach an entire class to the first year students dedicated to presenting the facts of the case, the way lawyers do in their opening statements. They actually had to create the set of facts for each side. It was really interesting how you could totally bias it by what you emphasized or left out and the different words used (i.e. word connotations).

I liked the way Howard Zinn (who had his own rather strong biases, of course) made that point in the afterword to A People's History of the United States:

>But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.

Manufacturing Consent is a must-read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

> Everyone is pushing a narrative

But this an exaggeration. Some people are truly equivocal on a question, yet still able to muster the effort to write about it.

One way this happens is that some specific issue puts the author's internal values in tension. An example would be recall/impeachment of some corrupt official, where the tension is between the two goods of removing the bad actor from power, and maintaining the norm of orderly transition of government power.

This is very true about agenda setting.

What is great about Wikipedia's "Current events" portal is that you don't have to sift through tweets that are selected by the news feed algorithm to make you angry, or a stream of op-eds that are selected by an editor to do the same, in order to get to the facts. Much healthier psychologically while still staying reasonably informed.

Wikipedia is incredibly biased in terms of what news it cherry picks though. Just read through the debates of what gets proposed for inclusion, and then think about the stuff that's outright deleted.

Do you have some examples?

"Just read through the debates of what gets proposed for inclusion, and then think about the stuff that's outright deleted."

I kinda also would like to see a concrete example.

There was a great article posted here a few years back I’d love to find again, that discusses how to use Wikipedia to reinforce a position without lying. Splitting your side into a bunch of mutually reinforcing pages, careful choose of when to include or exclude adjectives, and so on. I found it pretty eye-opening.

For example, the entire entry for "mass formation" was deleted. The Dutch version still exists:

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massavorming

Also https://legiblenews.com

I would recommend people use sites like allsides.com or ground.news to read from a wide variety of sources across the political spectrum. Any one site (even one edited by a variety of people) will have its own set of biases, so I find it best to visit Web sites that contain links to coverage of the same event from a few different sources with different biases.

I think it's better to manually assess bias and think critically about how news articles report information. The sites you linked are interesting, but had some major flaws.

For example, AllSides includes Breitbart as a source. While it identifies it with the maximum value to the right, it doesn't give a barometer of credibility. For a reader deciding whether Breitbart is worth reading, one should closely examine credibility, not just political leaning. PolitiFact and Media Bias/Fact Check discussed the credibility of Breitbart at length [0] [1].

Then for ground.news, the way it portrays bias is also relatively simplistic. The most prominent indicator is left/center/right, but biases have a lot more nuance. It's more useful to account for how certain publications take certain policy stances. Leanings can be anti-establishment, pro-establishment, socialist, neoliberal, pro-consumption (e.g. Wired), or anti-consumption, and this information is lost when relying on left-center-right categorizations.

The best way to do this is to manually select a few publications that are high on factual credibility, write down their specific biases or leanings, and compare stories across the personally-curated selection of publications. You then personally have more control and understanding of the articles you are presented.

[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/28/stella-imm...

[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/breitbart/

Both of those sites are useful and I'd like to add one more: I've been using TheDailyEdit[0] app (it was on the front page here not too long ago). It doesn't tell you what political spectrum the publisher is on, but it does help you identify when the article is using manipulative language. The coolest thing though is that when you're in an article it shows you what was missing but reported by other sources. So I can read news I like but be sure that I'm not missing something because of 'bias by omission' by the publisher.

[0] https://dailyedit.com/

cant find the rss feed for that page.

You are right, I the feed it’s not coming from Wikipedia itself: https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/current_events/

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