[mech1234]

I strongly urge all people who wish to be informed citizens to consume news sources from diverse sources. Selection bias of what events get covered is a huge source of political spin, and using diverse sources is the only way to eliminate selection bias.

Consider any statement with morally-significant wording to be the spin, and whatever is left over to be the facts on the ground worth considering. The vast majority of the time, reliable news sources get the facts on the ground right and, and only introduce spin with the moral phrasings and choosing what to omit. This is still true if the source is from the evil other party, and only starts disintegrating once you really get to the fringes.

[jfengel]

By way of alternative, I'd suggest not consuming news at all. Or at least, delaying your consumption of news to sources that have had a chance to digest and consider the news, such as a weekly news magazine.

It's very, very rare that you require up-to-the-minute news. Continually-updated news sources, like Internet sources or 24 hour news channels, are more for entertainment than information. They focus on keeping your attention, which pushes them to pick up unverified stories and magnify their importance out of proportion.

You will lose very little actual knowledge by hearing about the news a week later. Switching to a delayed news source doesn't automatically remove political spin, but the people most interested in manipulating your views have mostly switched to more immediate media, which are more powerful.

[crusso]

Just think of all of the panic news stories where the facts and the corresponding emotional impact evaporated within 48 hours.

Quick-release news cycles are toxic to a healthily informed society the way that rumor-mongering is toxic to healthy social communities.

[yboris]

I strongly encourage people to reduce / remove news consumption as well.

News is not a good way to learn about the world - news is precisely what is unusual. Consuming news gives you a distorted sense of what real life is like.

[dennnis]

Also don't just rely on your own experiences. Not everyone is like you

[dredmorbius]

This.

My preferred general news programme is On the Media, a weekly broadcast (and podcast) by WNYC Studios, nominally examining the media itself, almost always in the context of current news, or some background with relevance to current news.

The show runs an "NPR hour" (about 51 minutes), and covers four stories, devoting about 15 minutes to each. It's generally finalised on Friday, and broadcast Saturday / Sunday in most markets. Segments based on an interview with a subject-matter expert, rarely a typical bloviating talking head, occasionally someone directly involved in a story. The interviews are closely edited.

The result is a concise, thoughtful, informed summary of major events of the past week, without the drama, emotion, and raw churn of the usual 24/7 news cycle. Yes, you'll miss out on a bunch of stories, the vast majority of which don't matter.

The hosts, Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, are excellent, with a biting dry humour. Brooke's "mmm-hmm"s can speak volumes.

The biggest ommission is whatever local news is relevant to you. Unfortunately, that's a news hole that's not being filled by much of anyone at the moment, outside a very few large markets (NYC, Washington, London, in English-language markets).

I'll also take an occasional scan of centrist headlines (Reuters of late), which tends to be very solidly balanced. Financial Times has a good rundown as well. Note that I try to restrict this scan to just headlines.

For complex and evolving stories -- the current coronavirius outbreak is an example, though the first case I'd noted was the 2004 Boxing Day Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami -- Wikipedia articles make for excellent ongoing summaries of best current information. Vastly superior to virtually any news outlet. (Brad Plumer's Oroville Dam coverage at Vox being a notable exception: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16538941)

20 years ago, strictly, before the Elian Gonzales story, I'd have suggested NPR's news magazines (Morning Edition, All Things Considered) as well worth the time. I no longer feel this, and haven't for a well over a decade. When NPR was more a suffering network without realtime capabilities, stories were submitted, edited, prepared, and largely rolled from tape. The 9/11 attacks made the network aware of its "dark secret" that much of the news programme was in fact pre-recorded. Whilst a negative in the case of critical breaking news, for the most part I'd argue this was a hidden strength of the network, as it had time to at least somewhat digest, consider, and edit what went out on the air. In the past decade, NPR (and other national broadcasters: CBC, BBC, ABC/Australia) have leaned far more on live reports on-air ... leading to worse reporting, far more technical glitches (often in the midst of interviews), and a generally more annoying product. The notion of inserting a slight delay -- 5 minutes even, though an hour or day generally wouldn't hurt -- in the "magazine" coverage would hugely improve the end result.

This is apparently an unpopular opinion.

It's also possible I've simply learned enough to see the holes in much coverage by these outlets.

And I no longer find the urge to listen to news on even a daily basis, as you suggest.

Replacements include several podcasts, notably the back-catalogs of "The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps", "The New Books Network", and "LSE Lectures", all of which present thoughts of experts, distanced from contemporary hubub, at length, and though the direct relationships are reduced, the relevance to what's happening now is often great, with tremendous insight.

An abundance of information means a surfeit of that which inforation consumes: attention. (I believe that's Herbert Simon.) Information overload is really filter failure (Clay Shirky), and a crisis or catastrophe is a time in which previous models of the world no longer fit the present reality (my own notion, though with similarities to numerous others' observations).

We're in the midst of one such catastrophe -- a period of revelation, not in the religious sense, but in the way of a falling away of scales of no-longer-appropriate models.

(This is one of the problems with news coverage as journalism attempts to fit current events into pre-existing narratives -- when those narratives are false, the reportage similarly fails.)

[sm4rk0]

Except for HN (:

[DubiousPusher]

I would add to that you have to find some news sources outside the U.S. mainstream. For years I read all the biggies but there were all kinds of things I missed.

U.S. deploying troops in Africa U.S. mistaken drone strikes against civilians Uighut detention in China The success of drug decriminalisation in Portugal Etc

There is a collective bias in mainstream news wherein they decide what is interesting and bias against airing anything that they believe viewers will find boring. This leads to a strong bias away from anything outside the collective middle class mainstream lived experience. I don't think it's intentional but it's very pernicious.

[karatestomp]

Listen to NPR and you'd think strikes and such in the US are extremely rare and unions are mostly passive. Listen to Democracy Now and you'd think they're happening constantly and unions are very active. That just from a choice of what to cover, and on one issue.

[darkerside]

Is there a Drudge Report type aggregator specifically for this kind of news?

[DubiousPusher]

Man I wish. I don't know of one. I love the Drudge Report no matter what liberal media says about it. It's got crazy but it's got everything else too.

[darkerside]

Yeah, crowdsourced content is great, but there's something to be said for things curated by a single actual human being.

[alwaysanagenda]

I recommend citizen journalists Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak who produce a twice-weekly media deconstruction on their podcast NoAgendaShow.com

There are no ads or corporate sponsors or outside influences -- and never will be. The podcast has run nearly 12 years strong and it has been 100% listener supported.

[mikestew]

John C. Dvorak has in the past been a crank and admitted troll. Until I see public repentance, I recommend against staking one’s reputation on anything coming out of Dvorak.

Source: Pick an article from the pcmag.com archives.

[mistermann]

I do now and then, they have a perfectly valid perspective but they are obviously very biased to the right.

[mola]

Then you just end up just picking and choosing by what you want to believe.

Ethics and norms are the only solution.