ATS Poll-Most Unbiased News Source

The Dark Arts of PR, You may think you are a consumer but you are being consumed.

Did you know that when you read an article to position and placement of words has been designed to hack into neuro-linguistics so a story can contain completely balanced information but make you only agree with one side? Every single line in every single newspaper is written to 'count' to avoid white space and looking unprofessional. A count is the sum total total of every letter and space 'score', scores are determined by letter width, for example w is 1.5, h is 1, i is 0.5. Every line has a different count depending on the placement of adverts (the first thing put onto newspaper design before stories are written).

In newspaper format this is known as a 'T' shape, where if you imagine a T drawn on the newspaper page the areas covered in the two lines are the ones our attention is focused on and eyes scan over several times more than others. Information outside this field of view is only read once rather than repeated and becomes more memorable. The same technique is used online, however it's 75% harder to read on-screen vs. print so the area where eyes and brain concentrate on most become an 'F' shape.


After WW2 the West was left in a quandary, Fascism and the emerging threat of Communism meant propaganda was no longer a socially acceptable term for government or companies to use - so they changed the name to the pleasant sounding 'Public Relations' trillion dollar industry it has become today.

PR and advertorials are the enemy of journalism and free and fair democracy - they're the reason why 90% of the content you read in newspapers is complete fiction that fails to question or investigate any claims, 60% of the content is actually written directly by the companies themselves.

If you have ever read or seen a news report, or even news campaign, about a person with an illness who needs a specific medication there's a strong likelyhood they may have the illness (still been cases of faking) however there's a far stronger chance (approaching 99%) that said individual has been trained and paid by a pharmaceutical company to promote their particular drug and exploit their tragic case to put public pressure on the government or insurer to sign multi-million/billion contracts to supply the drug.

Pharmaceutical companies themselves have been corrupted by PR causing stagnation in progress. They used to spend 70% on R&D and 30% on advertising drugs in the 60s causing a wave of groundbreaking treatments, by 2000 that had changed to 30% R&D and 70% Advertising with 60% of the drugs being 'recycled' to treat new invented conditions as discoveries have dried up. For example the drug Propanalol and general beta blockers have been used for decades to treat hyper tension, yet with the re-branding of shyness as social anxiety pharma pushed a narrative such a thing required medicines and rake billions from it from a phase most people experience at some point in life.

None.

Everything has bias.

And then that bias is filtered through your own, which leaves you with memories of snippets that confirm your bias, and few memories of snippets that challenge it.

a reply to: bastion

"There are no political solutions , only technological ones, the rest is propaganda"

a reply to: bastion

Are there any journalistic attempts to build a new impartial global community of journalism that is outside of the "PR" Circus , so that we can have factual stories being told instead of PR drenched propaganda that only cares about spreading materialism
and the pursuit of the all mighty dollar

Bob the cat. He doesn't say anything leaving me open to use my own bias.

EDIT NOTE: "Make Us Of" is an article about the second source "Media Bias Fact Check".

Here are two good sources for 'checking' out a 'news' source. They both separate 'left-right' bias from factual reporting as two exclusive metrics.

Now, let’s be clear: just because a media site is biased does not mean it’s disreputable! For example, The Wall Street Journal may skew right while The Atlantic may skew left, but both sites do their due diligence and produce high-quality articles that are worth reading. Having a slight political bias is perfectly normal.

www.makeuseof.com...

There is also:

mediabiasfactcheck.com...

Which also offers informed opinion on the two metrics to keep in mind:

mediabiasfactcheck.com...

A Chart of left-right and factual content from '"Make Use Of":

BBC or some other outside news source. Not American. American media sources are notoriously biased.

I think you could possibly still get some straight news on CNN, FOX or MSNBC or Headline news. It's not the actual news shows...it's all the talk shows that lie to you.

You will get a little bias on all of those but generally they do it by ommision. One news station won't have Stormy Daniels and the other 3 will. One won't talk about Russians and the other 3 will.

But even that. Are they really giving us the important news or just the news that is sensational?

I don't watch any news unless there is a serious event and I want some extra coverage. I don't even watch local news.

If it's serious it will show up on my facebook feed or I'll get an email a message or a phone call.

a reply to: JinMI

Depends on what you want to look at. When it comes to anything political I find crappy fox to be the best, science/tech I like CNN and BBC.

a reply to: sapien82

Yes quite a lot, the good ones have got even better and wholly independent with advent of crowd-funding which removes all external bias pressure. Worked for a few on big stories that took months of investigation working with over 400 journos from BBC, CH4, Guardian, Times and local news in smaller groups called 'turtles'. I made my break into investigative journalism attending these and getting to work with editors, famous reporters; they're incredibly supportive of anyone taking an interest in accurate, hard hitting journalism. What country are they in?

In general Beaurau of Investigative Journalism - they do around three stories per month but they haghly deatailed, groundbreaking stories that cause lwas to change, companies to close or uncover scandals that normal papers are unable to do due to only having a handful of staff.

Last year there was the groundbreaking discovery that Superbugs and bacteria/viruses resistant to anti-virals, anti-biotics are all traced back to polution from pharma companies in India and there's major efforts to clean that practice up now to stop the spread of one of the biggest threats to life.

www.thebureauinvestigates.com...
cpj.org...
www.frontlineclub.com...
www.journalism.co.uk...
tcij.org...

Are some UK centred ones, can do country specific if wanted but only worked with one US group of journos.

a reply to: JinMI

When it comes to news they are all biased.

So I tend to read or watch a bunch of different things in order to see what is similar between them.

When it comes to science I like to read essays and peer reviewed papers.

originally posted by: scraedtosleep
When it comes to science I like to read essays and peer reviewed papers.

Have you tried?

www.iflscience.com...

a reply to: intrepid

lol yes they are very popular but those are not what I meant.

Those are articles written by people who may or may not have read the actual paper.

a reply to: intrepid

Check this out. agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com...