Comment by somethoughts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somethoughts | Hacker News Reader

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I find the closest to an unbiased news source is Reuters.

I removed all other news apps from my phone and only leave the Reuters news app installed. [1]

I never read the news anymore.

The combination of the uncurated deluge of articles about stuff I don't know anything about (and realize I am not going to ever really know anything about) and them not really poking my buttons with editorialized headlines makes me just ignore it and come here more often instead.

Edit: I fathom its because the Reuters business model is fundamentally different - they are just trying to supply as many articles for use as raw base material factoids to all types of media organizations who can then add their own "secret sauce/value" by curating which articles their audience "sees" and handle the "interpretation" of the factoids (i.e. insert the editorial opinion with headlines, quips for their audiences will appreciate). That said - I do recall reading about some instances that Reuters is not perfect (article rushed to press and not entirely factually correct).

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reuters-news/id602660809

Reuters isn't so much a source of news, it's a (top level) news aggregator. A source would be an experiencer telling their story about the events considered new, i.e. unexpected. News are updates of our collective model of the world.

Human communication has the aspects of content, sentiment and style. People look at style first, as they take it as an indicator for the social standing of the speaker. Sentiment is a close second, as it tells you about the attitude that speaker has towards the reported events. Content lastly is just the events themselves as they (reportedly) happened.

People find that content part hard to follow on its own, mostly because they usually don't really know the context anyway. Focusing on it as supposedly important "unbiased" "true" news is a gross misunderstanding.

Like yourself, people generally have a very incomplete idea of the world they live in. Like you, they don't seem to take much interest in it, as they view it as "not relevant to their lives". That is an absurd statement to make, if one has no clue about that part of the world to begin with, like you observed.

Recently declassified documents that they used to run propaganda for the British government in the 70s:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-media-idUSKBN1ZC2...

Makes you wonder what the as yet to be declassified top secret documents say.

> “ In 1969, Reuters needed money to further expand in the Middle East and Western powers such as Britain wanted to bolster their influence against the Soviet Union by expanding news services across the world, the documents showed.

The secret government financing of Reuters - as set out in the documents - amounted to 245,000 pounds ($317,838 at current exchange rates) per year before 1969 but then reduced to 100,000 pounds per year in 1969-1970 and nothing in 1972-1973.”

I don’t grasp what the article’s writer meant by “current exchange rates” and “before 1969” here, but in any event it sounds like only a few million real constant 2023 dollar equivalents, total, were involved, which is less like a secret think tank and more like travel and bureau support, which is basically what is being admitted to.

> I find the closest to an unbiased news source is Reuters.

Maybe for American news it is unbiased across conservatives / liberals, however from a non-American point of view Reuters is very VERY much biased towards US / CIA (even though it is incorporated in England).

What makes you say that it is very much biased?

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