Any suggestions for a good neutral concise must-know news source?
It's not neutral. It's pro-market.
But it is concise and if you just read it you'd be better informed than almost everyone.
Some of my friends swear by Al-Jazeera for non Middle-East news
The ABC (Australian version) gets comments that it's heavily left-wing, yet they have their own internal metrics that watch for evenness of opinion, and these have to match up with an external auditor.
Of course no-one can be neutral about a subjective topic, but it's interesting that those news organisations with strong reputations for quality general-news reporting are always seen as 'left-wing rags'.
Are the ABC's internal metric's available? What about the audits?
Their selection of journalists on current affairs shows is interesting though. Chris Uhlman's wife is an ALP MP, Barrie Cassidy was a Hawke staffer, Maxine McKew became an ALP member, Kerry O'Brien was a Whitlam staffer. It's almost like there is a pattern....
My knowledge came from a friend of mine who had some reason to be at an ABC office at one point and witnessed a meeting between the ABC staffers and the external agency, and they were concerned that their week's tallies didn't match up, as they were out 2 minutes. I imagine that the ABC's numbers would be public info somewhere, and I have no idea about the external agency.
As for the list of journos, it doesn't really say much about the content itself, if the content is monitored. I mean, if you want to do quality current affairs on TV in Australia, there's ABC, and there's SBS, the latter of which doesn't do much domestic stuff (as it's not their bailiwick).
Actually determining bias is difficult.
There is also Meet the Press on the commercial stations and Sky News is actually well worth watching if you have it. Richo's show and Peter Van Onselen's are really good.
But reading news is far better at any rate.
I don't think it's surprising that the majority of established media companies lean in a certain political direction. People on one side of the political spectrum may be more attracted to journalism than the other side, which would naturally lead to media companies producing journalism more sympathetic to the political arguments that their employees are sympathetic to.
For US political news realclearpolitics.com is pretty good. They also aggregate news on other topics but I haven't explored those personally.
Could, not, resist.
Though on the subject of neutrality, humans aren't neutral, so expecting their publications to be is itself insane.
Guess I'll think twice before posting something positive about HN from now on.
But it is not:
* neutral: there are some pretty obvious biases, though they aren't consistent
* need-to-know: there's nothing I've learned on HN which has been strictly necessary to me, though there's a lot which was interesting
* concise: the net information density is relatively low, than higher on many other discussion sites. (Low bar, I know...)
As for need to know, might I be so bold as to suggest that if you haven't learned anything of use at HN, perhaps it's not suited for your interests/profession?
What comes up on HN to me, is more entertaining, and somewhat more relevant (I do run across the things once in a while that I could apply to what I do at my work.)