ATS Poll-Most Unbiased News Source

a reply to: VictorVonDoom

Can't argue with that. My first venture is always ATS as well.

originally posted by: JinMI
a reply to: VictorVonDoom

Can't argue with that. My first venture is always ATS as well.

ATS is particularly useful with bringing local "niche" news to our attention, or subjects that you don't see in the MSM. (Aliens, Astronomy Advances, Historic Finds, etc.)

I tend to follow the writer, regardless where they might be found. Over time, you get a great sense of the person behind the story.

Too many to list, but the Glenn Greenwald example is a good one. Great reporter. Honest broker.

Alex Jones and infowars. Unbiased information with style.

Thanks God AJ was on the gay frog story first and warned us just in the nick of time.
And the supplements he offers on his show are great.

originally posted by: olaru12
Alex Jones and infowars.

Thanks God AJ was on the gay frog story first and warned us just in the nick of time.
And his supplements he offers on his show are great.

I said news...not entertainment!

Fox

I pretty much use all of them. And even then you don't really get the whole, true story, but you at least get a clear picture of all the angles they're working and how they want people to react accordingly.

I even sometimes like to slum it down at the obviously fake news sites because occasionally they'll leak true stories to these sites in an attempt to get out in front of the story and discredit it early on. Hillary's health issues during the election are an obvious example of this. Again, you won't get the whole, true story, but a transmogrified version of it. But that is the point of leaking real information to these sites because they'll run with it haphazardly and turn a story about Hillary having health issues into something insanely unbelievable to the point where no one will give the idea that there might be something to it a second thought.

My guidelines for deciphering the news is to collect it from all sources, keep your wits about you, try to remember everything (keep a log if you have to), trust no one and always remember that it all boils down to one thing: control.

a reply to: JinMI

It's not just the outlet, it's also the reporter and it's not just about bias. There are some right-leaning reporters I follow because they have good sources and get good scoops. You also have to separate opinion pieces from reporting. The WSJ op-eds are slanted pretty hard to the right but their reporters break big, important stories. The NYT's op-ed's are typically left-leaning though they've tried to strike some kind of balance recently with some people with super bad right-leaning takes. (not Ann Coulter right-leaning mind you) The NYT breaks big stories because they're the NYT and they staff high profile reporters with excellent sources.

The President can # all over WaPo but WaPo breaks big stories. I follow a few people from Daily Caller because they break big stories sometimes. Chuck Ross in particular (Flynn lobbying for Turkey, Stephen Halper meeting Papadopoulos).

The Intercept does good reporting. McClatchy has a good staff or reporters. Then of course you have the news wires, AP, AFP, Reuters. You've got foreign papers like The Guardian and The Independent. More niche reporting like Foreign Policy and Financial Times. Bloomberg. LA Times for West Coast news. Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald for crazy ass Florida. Some other top papers by circulation: USA Today, Denver Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times.

Then there's CNN, Fox and MSNBC/NBC, ABC and CBS. There's BBC of course. They've all got bias, some worse than others, but they also have big news rooms and top reporters with big networks of sources. There's the magazines: TIME, Newsweek, sometimes Rolling Stone, The New Yorker (Ronan Farrow has been getting it in). You've got some upstarts that are sort of on the same tier: BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, Daily Wire, Daily Caller who I mentioned earlier, Vice News is hit or miss but they sometimes have interesting stuff nobody else covers.

Everyone's got bias. All outlets get it wrong sometimes. They all let a certain amount of slop through. They all sensationalize. I try to cast a fairly wide net, weed out the facts. Look for confirmation from competing outlets and avoid outlets and reporters that I know have a bad ratio of accurate reporting to garbage.

I don't think it's realistic to hope for a small list of bias-free independent outlets that you can exclusively get your news from. I think it's better to draw from lots of diverse sources and to be a better consumer of news.

I will love how this board will HATE Musk's "pravda.com".

Bc Breitbart, conservativetreehouse, thehill and so on will definitely show up there as "full of fakes".

But that is not my problem.
You wouldn't even know my newssources.

originally posted by: olaru12
Alex Jones and infowars. Unbiased information with style.

Thanks God AJ was on the gay frog story first and warned us just in the nick of time.
And the supplements he offers on his show are great.

Have you have had your daily dose of chocolate flavored chicken bone broth. I hear that is a big seller.

The whole approach is mistaken. A piece of journalism cannot be judged based on where it comes from, but on its merits. Even if it is biased, politically motivated, and written by someone lacking credibility, it can be true. Even the National Enquirer broke news.

originally posted by: JinMI

originally posted by: olaru12
Alex Jones and infowars.

Thanks God AJ was on the gay frog story first and warned us just in the nick of time.
And his supplements he offers on his show are great.

I said news...not entertainment!

therein lies a problem.

If you want unbiased, you need to not listen to what one person tells you, but what many people say.

Everything is more than the arrow. And much more than the bow.

a reply to: JinMI

I think it always best to get news from different sources and see where there are inconsistencies
compare and contrast , find out where the truth is yourself !

time consuming but if you are that way inclined then its actually fun being a detective for a bit!

As an ex journo I use a variety - The least biased, most thorough, most transparent journalism is conducted by non-profit journalism charities and foundations like Frontline and Bureau of Investigative Journalism providing amazing reporting - there's also journals that cover stories in forensic detail.

Media wise I use newsire AP, Reuters as original source rather than newspaper write ups, which can add useful detail or biased spin. Paper wise a mix of Financial Times, news written for people who need to know what's going on, BBC, DeBilde, Observer/Guardian, Telegraph, for a mix of highly respected in depth coverage with some but limited bias in them then finally make sure to read twice as many sources that disagree with my viewpoint (at this point) in an attempt to remove my own bias (I jot down bullet points of my personal bias on topics when starting.

The trick is to read widely and regularly, especially information that goes against your view. Patterns in bias gradually emerge and with practice it's pretty easy to sift through the media and work out which parts are facts, which are false, which could be true or false.

Brief guide:

Image manipulation
Minor changes in angles, cropping of photos, editing, displaying a smiley, frowny, angry, worried face etc.. can provide a completely different slant on the story - Images of faces or children have huge impact consciously and sub consciously. A famous manipulation was the Kevin Carter 'starving child about to be eaten by vulture' picture which was staged but represented what was going on en masse.

With the advent of Photoshop journalists have reached a whole new low on staging photographs. In the UK there was the disgraceful case of providing the official photographs for terminal Canceer sufferer, Jade Goody's wedding just before her death, where they took a photo from pre-chemotherapy and then spent hours photoshoping her hair out and cut and pasting it onto her wedding kiss photo.

Inverted News Pyramid
News is written with an attention grabbing headline, a 23 word byline that summarises the story and then follows what is called an inverted news pyramid. The most important information, as the paper sees it, is placed at the top of the article, with every paragraph there is less important information. This is because people get bored of reading and editors 'cut from the bottom up' so you need to get the key bits in the top three para's to avoid it getting pinched - comparing differences in how media place information within this reals bias.

Millitary titles
Basic but we say General Pinochet and Colonel Gaddafi as their nom-de-plume yet the Queen, President etc... do not have these terms applied to them unless central to the story which has a huge impact on how people interpret news.

Will continue laster...

a reply to: bastion

Bastion would you mind If I quote this text on my social media to my friends who are all into conspiracy and journalism etc!

one of my friends Darren "loki" McGarvey is a journalist Im sure he'd love this !

originally posted by: sapien82
a reply to: bastion

Bastion would you mind If I quote this text on my social media to my friends who are all into conspiracy and journalism etc!

one of my friends Darren "loki" McGarvey is a journalist Im sure he'd love this !

Not a problem there's not a conspiracy by papers or proprietors, they only hold 5 - 10% influence - the real corruption comes from PR which makes up 90% of news and is false. but got loads more to come on PR, Critical Discourse, Use and Abuse of Public/Private sources, How to source and the like. Can recommend loads of books, Readers if required. It's far more complex than the unfounded 'MSM work for TPTB', it works for them as financial, PR and time constraints make it nigh on impossible for journalists to do their job.

Wrote a case study of 25,000 words on how the Alleged Al Qu'eda head in Iraq, Al-Zaquari, who was paraded as the most evil man on Earth for years by the Allied government and media was completely fabricated - he was a goatherder who lived with his Mum. The Al Qu'eda fighters were goats, the IED factory was a sack of fertiliser for the farm. Same with Jessica Lynch - she was never kidnapped or any of that nonsense, she was driving too fast, tipped the truck and CENTCOM spread the lie to avoid embarrasment.

The DoD were spending £500m on Iraq in 2003 to manipulate the story and stop the media getting hold of accurate info and to spread propaganda, it's well over a billion annually now.

Al'Queda in Iraq - The Myth that turned into a Monster
I wrote a thesis on the above and to what extent the spending influenced reporting analyzing six months coverage over twelve US and UK newspapers. To my shock it turned out none of it was needed as despite Intel agents from US, UK, Germany all desperately telling the press the Iraq story was a lie, Curveball was making it up - the Press completely failed to ever question the evidence or case for war and chose instead to write about guided trips around US warships displaying war as entertainment.

Chief amongst these were the claims that Saddam had given support to Al Qu'eda a claim that naturally would cause mass outrage in a nation in mouring and curry favour for war.

The only problem was it was a lie. Al Qu'eda had tried to approach Saddam in 2000 and he refused to talk to them. Colin Powell needed a bogeyman and he created one by embellishing to story of Al-Zarqawi, even going as far as changing his name. The real name of the person is Ahmed Fadel al-Khalahyeh which was deemed to hard to remember.

Al-Zarqawi was by no means a nice man. However in 2000 he travelled to Afghanistan to meet Bin Laden who wanted his help in attacking Americans . Al-Zarqawi refused to fight Americans or to join Al-Qu'ieda - He was Salafi not Wahabi he had been tortured for years in Arab prisons and thought Jihad needed to focus on Arab nations. He was an unknown figure in Jihad with only a couple of troops.

Fast forward to 2003 when Colin Powell delivered a completely fabricated story about him being head of Al-Qu'eda in Iraq, Osamas right hand, Saddam's friend, responsible for several bombings and assassination attempts, Bush called him proof of Al-Que'da in Iraq and Al-Zarqawi's famous black and white photo was featured on every news show, at the time Al-Qu'eda were almost done for with Bin Laden and co holed up in Pewshwar. The intelligence reports the US showed to journalists were comically inept - one week he had an eye patch and wooden leg, the next he was fully limbed and sighted

Al-Zarqawi had been in Hamat, Kurdish-Iranian territory not Iraq, since Afghanistan. Overnight the fabricated fighter was catapulted from complete obscurity to the worlds most dangerous terrorist, but seeing his chance he moved there in August 2003 unleashing wave after wave of bombings killing 100,000s.

All could have been avoided if the media had questioned the narrative instead of regurgitating it and adding their own fabrications.

a reply to: JinMI

I don't think any news sources are really unbiased. Personally i'd just like to read some objective news that says nothing but facts, doesn't put a slant on anything, doesn't add any opinions, and does not try to appeal to emotions...That's what i'd consider unbiased...i've yet to find such a source though.

So from what I'm reading none of you have any which was pretty much what I thought from the start.

I'm book marking this thread to use in the future.

a reply to: bastion

Hey Yeh Id be more than willing to have a look at some links or further reading documents if you have any!

thanks

I don't think there is such a thing as an unbiased news source. That being said, I think there are some that, though they may be at least a little biased, can still be fairly trustworthy. I like the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. I watch Fox but I ignore anything that sounds blatantly biased. I used to do the same with CNN to get both sides of the story but everything on CNN is blatantly biased now so there is no point in watching any more.

Polls bear out the real feelings on "unbiased" sources. Liberals trust CNN and think Fox is nothing but lies. Conservatives are pretty much the exact opposite. They are both biased. The question is: which one is right the most often?"