[my_first_acct]

> For all these reasons, I have got rid of my NYT & WaPo subscription to FT now and I can't be happier.

I think you have a typo. Are you saying that you switched to FT (Financial Times), or that you got rid of the FT as well?

Anyway, if you are a US-based reader, one way to avoid some of the bias and noise is to subscribe to a non-US paper. You don't have reporters and columnists trying to sway voters, because that's not who the audience is. Plus you might discover that interesting events do take place outside of the US. (And uninteresting events. Brexit seems like it should be interesting, but all the daily political ins and outs are, in my non-UK view, a bit tedious...)

[scottLobster]

Sadly non-US sources incur the bias of however said source feels about the US. I've seen the BBC home page highlight more random shootings than the actual US mainstream media. And in my experience they'll keep them on the front page longer than CNN when reporting on the same one. It could just be the page I'm being presented via cookie-stored history or whatever, but that seems unlikely as I hardly ever click on said stories.

Unfortunately it seems the only way to effectively reduce bias is to go straight to the primary source and judge for yourself, which is time-consuming.

[Tomte]

And what makes you so sure that the BBC's handling of those stories isn't the correct one?

Your personal bias, of course.

We see in this thread many people who condemn newspapers because they report differently than they themselves would, and then have the gall to call that "bias".

[smsm42]

The problem is not that they report differently, but that they fixate on a particular part of the whole picture, and emphasize it beyond all proportion, while neglecting other parts of the picture. It's like if you asked somebody to describe an elephant for you and they'd spend 99% of the time on its tail, describing it in a minute detail up to each hair on its end, and then spending only a couple of words on the rest of the animal - would you be able to adequately imagine what an elephant look like? You probably would think it's like some hairy snake or something :) That's the kind of coverage some biased news outlets provide.

[Tomte]

You think the other parts are important because you don't like the tail.

But say, do you look forward to daily reports in your newspaper how on XY street there was no traffic accident yesterday? Or that no criminal escaped from YZ prison last month?

It's perfectly legitimate to focus on the interesting parts. You want to learn about an elephant's anatomy? Read a biology textbook, not journalism.

[smsm42]

> You think the other parts are important because you don't like the tail.

Thanks for a case study. That's exactly what the press does - describe only the tail and call everyone who objects tail-phobes. No, I'm not going to pay for such baloney. If they find advertisers gullible enough to pay for it - good for them. Otherwise, good riddance.

> It's perfectly legitimate to focus on the interesting parts.

Of course. It's also perfectly legitimate for me not to pay for it if I'm interested in whole picture, not tail hairs. Let the tail hair enthusiasts finance it.

[Tomte]

"I don't care about it" is a fundamentally different thing than "they are biased".

Sure, don't pay for it. I don't pay for Magic: The Gathering cards. But I also don't troll message boards how WotC deserve to die because they neglect XBox games, thus showing their bias towards Collectible Card Games.

[Nasrudith]

Sounds like they are pointing out the normalization and you are doubling down after being told that no, having a heart attack at 30 isn't normal.

[scottLobster]

No it isn't normal. It also isn't common. Gun homicides don't even crack the top 10 causes of death in America, yet the BBC chooses to devote a disproportionate amount of their US front page to it. They certainly front-page shootings more than heart disease, that's the definition of bias.

Right or wrong, noble intentions or not, it's not an accurate portrayal of America as a whole on the part of the BBC. If CNN ran a front page column every time someone in the UK died of alcohol poisoning, would you consider that unbiased coverage of the UK?

[smsm42]

There's no "normalization" - nobody treats murders as "normal". However, there's a difference between treating it as normal and treating is as bad, but rare abnormal, and putting it in the context of overall big picture. You can say "66 people are attacked by sharks recently" and it would look like a bloody carnage which warrants very grave concern. Or you can put it in the context that it's over all wide world, and there was one single shark attack fatality in the US over whole past year, and about 10x more people are killed each year by vending machines.

[scottLobster]

It's the definition of selection bias. Gun homicides don't even crack the top 10 causes of death in the United States. But the BBC sure seems to front-page it more than heart disease.

Of course we all have our personal biases that can never be fully eliminated. But if you wanted to summarize the "current state of America" in one web page, statistically speaking some bastard shooting 3 bystanders in a botched robbery in a high crime area of East St. Louis (made up, but similar to stuff I've seen on the front page before) shouldn't even approach making the list.

[SlowRobotAhead]

>And what makes you so sure that the BBC's handling of those stories isn't the correct one? Your personal bias, of course.

Well, actual verified accounts and statistics for one. BBC loves nothing more than highlighting USA shootings - despite near historic record lows of gun violence and definitely lows of gun ownership to crime ratios.

BBC does this because they want to “prove” how much better they are not being allowed the choice of how to defend yourself. It’s British smugness 101.

Btw... Did you see the school shooting last week where the aggresor was wearing a smash the patriarchy shirt - no you probably did not, and definitely didn’t see it on BBC.

Narrative and Bias. BBC can be trusted at all on firearms anywhere.

[Tomte]

In my country all school and mass shootings that have occurred have been top news for days, if not weeks.

Now look at this list of only school shootings in America and tell me again that the BBC is unfairly reporting on too many of them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_...

What percentage have they reported on, anyway? Low single digit?

Your "near historic record lows" are how many orders of magnitude more than in other countries?

[SlowRobotAhead]

That list of school shootings includes someone firing a gun near a school, and someone shooting a cat a 3am, as well as an officer discharging his gun negligently. Nice list, not hyperbolic at all.

You’ll be happy to know there are less school shootings today than the 90s. [0]

As opposed to other countries, where guns are available they are used... shocker! The fact is that where guns are in the USA, our rural areas have violence rates as near European rural rates. We have a lot of metropolitan areas with populations of 250k+ where our crime is, those are areas with illegal guns, that go with the drug, gang, poverty, inequality of social mobility, and gang problems. We have issues in the cities - but it’s not because of guns. That violence committed with guns is falling, despite record gun availability. The CDC found that where we have 10k homicides including all the drug and gang violence per year, we have 500,000 to 3,000,000 successful and legal defensive gun uses. And... to wrap up the “but other countries” argument, I don’t care what other countries to, in the USA we have a fundemental freedom to defend ourselves with the lost effective means of personal protection ever invented, it’s a natural right enumerated as a civil right.

[0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...

[OJFord]

> That list of school shootings includes someone firing a gun near a school, and someone shooting a cat a 3am, as well as an officer discharging his gun negligently. Nice list, not hyperbolic at all.

All of those things would make national news if they occurred in the UK.

[moorhosj]

You make a quick slight-of-hand in this comment. You start off talking about how gun violence, as a whole, is at low historic levels. Then, you go on to talk specifically about school shootings. As far as I can tell, school shootings are at historically high levels.

It seems legitimate to report on that considering schools are places that parents send their kids every day and have historically viewed them as safe. Add that most schools are publicly-run institutions and you have an interesting story of children shooting children at government run locations. If that doesn’t seem newsworthy to you, the bias may be in your own interpretation.

[SlowRobotAhead]

>As far as I can tell, school shootings are at historically high levels.

And you are also wrong about that. [0] My comment wasn’t about number of school shooting - but narrative. You don’t hear about them unless they fall into a given narrative. You don’t question what you are seeing at all, just happily accept it because it fits your bias.

[0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...

[moorhosj]

Ah yes, more slight of hand. In this instance, you have moved the goalposts to "mass" school shootings, only counting instances where 4 or more people were killed/injured. This list also doesn't seem to include shootings that took place at colleges, which are also schools (Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois and Umpqua come to mind). It almost like you don't question your source at all and just happily accepted it because it fits your bias.

Even if we just focus on K-12, you could download this [1] data from US Naval Postgraduate School and run a trend line all the way back to 1970.

[1] https://www.chds.us/ssdb/number-killed-by-year/

[NeedMoreTea]

I think we Brits are finding Brexit extremely tedious right about now, with no sign of an end to it. Our government tried for unicorns and rainbows to achieve a better deal in leaving than we had as a member. The EU, obviously, have to ensure it's a worse deal than being a member.

I used to subscribe to the FT. It's pretty balanced in its reporting, with good news coverage. Surprisingly perhaps, without the bias you might expect of a financial paper. For a while I'd be surprised to see well argued pieces making a case for less inequality, higher taxes, or a universal basic income. Then you stop being surprised they're not just a vehicle of the Tory party, like the Telegraph and Times mostly now are.

[BigJono]

What non-US paper though? In my experience as an Australian all of our papers are totally fucked. We don't have anything anywhere near as good as NYT or WaPo.

[femto]

Crinkling News [1] was a surprisingly good Australian newspaper. It ceased publication in January 2018, but I gather they would reopen if they could find the money (Costs $200k/year to run?).

It was written for children, essentially the print equivalent of ABC's Behind The News bulletin [2]. The writing level wasn't too far removed from the "adult" papers (I gather broadsheets are written to a 12 year old reading level and tabloids lower than that). Articles were a mix of mainstream news and kid specific stuff. There were fewer articles than an adult paper, but was basically all there with the extraneous stuff removed. It was completely independent.

[1] https://www.crinklingnews.com.au/

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/btn/

[caf]

The Saturday Paper is quite good. It's only a weekly, but really, there's usually only enough truly important stories around to fill a paper a week, which is why there's so much ephemera and filler in the daily news.

[8ytecoder]

Typo. I switched to the FT for the exact reason you mentioned - at least somewhat neutral third-party perspective.