Hi,

Recently, I have been more actively trying to keep up to date with current events. In the past, my knowledge of what is going on has usually been woefully inadequate.

The biggest problem I face is: I am paranoid about media bias... I want logical and unbiased journalism. I realize it is impossible to avoid bias completely, but there are definitely different levels of this.

Way too often I see a story written with tons of false implications. People post their outrage on facebook on an article, and I always have so many questions... How can I really decide if the company or government the article is deamonizing is really just being "Evil" or are there issues that the journalist are omitting simply to bring about the outrage of their readers (As opposed to telling the whole truth from both sides of the issue).

Basically my question is: Can anyone recommend news sources or general sources of information that has traceable credibility? Who do you read/watch/listen to?

Thanks

Hear that? That's the sound of a can of worms being opened.

Bring on all the worms.

I can decide which worms are tastiest easier when I have a whole can of them to compare.

I listen to and then believe rumour.
Also, I take a daily newspaper which I think it probably dying a bit of a death now as by the time I buy it after work, my faster-informed colleagues have pretty much told me anything of note anyway.

Yeah Newspapers, especially in print form are dead — they just don't know it yet. Where's Bruce Willis when you need him. Screw them all, even the ones whose politics I agree with.

TV news is a bit better, especially in Britain where it hasn't descended to the levels of American news channels (on all sides of the political spectrum.)

But in reality the best way is to simply not limit your sources, subscribe to a bunch of news feeds for all manner of sites, even if they're attached to aforementioned Newspaper and TV sources. Then find a bunch of interesting people to follow on Twitter, again try not to limit yourself to any one side of the political spectrum. Also good is finding blogs focused on specific areas; there are lots of technology ones out there for example, I follow a couple of good ones that examine for accuracy various claims made by politicians, daily newspapers or TV news, although the best way to find these is when people on Twitter link them.

And Lucksi does have a point about Al Jazeera, not so much because they are free from bias (it's made by humans, therefore bias exists) but because they largely avoid all the celebrity crap that manages to crowd out real news on the traditionally respectable sites like CNN.

Russia TV and the BBC I find are fairly good, at least when talking about news in the US. There is a Youtube channel, "MoxNews", that collects clips from the major news networks - you still get the standard bias, but you get ALL the bias, so it is a bit easier to filter it out. Also, a local Ohio channel has a guy (Ben Swann) that does a segment about usually national news (usually politics, during this election season) that is some of the most unbiased reporting I have ever seen. The various segments can be found here on their site.

This is great, thanks people. Keep them coming.

I will try to find a good variety of sources. I am thinking a good way to break free of misinformation is to look for inconsistencies between articles from different sources, and research those inconsistencies.

I like newser.com. It takes the AP feed, condenses fucking EVERYTHING to 2 paragraph stories. If I want to know more, then I go look it up. It's SUPER hard to hide a bias in 2 paragraphs. And usually it's clear the bias was the original authors.