[read_if_gay_]

> I'll simply wait for an independent source from another country to report on any such story.

Which countries specifically? I know that German-speaking news outlets aren’t any less partisan, and I have little reason to think that the rest of Europe is much better.

[jjk166]

There's nothing wrong with being partisan. Bias is inevitable but you can still be biased and correct. Known biases can be compensated for so long as the source is otherwise principled.

The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness. While luckily it's rare major media sources to just straight up fabricate false claims, fact checking has become virtually non-existent. Parroting the reporting of other journalists word for word is considered acceptable, and it has become common to see articles cite "according to another paper's anonymous sources." Articles get stuffed with filler disguised as context which often gets filtered as it gets rereported to cut out important details. Retractions are rare, and never prominent despite the clear prioritization of publishing quickly over taking the time to write a well researched article. They've also noticed its cheaper and easier to put the words "breaking news" in front of a headline which by no measure is than to actually go out and find urgent stories.

The partisanship and hyperpolarization is simply there to kind of cover up the laziness. Someone questions my lack of evidence? They're just a sea-lioning troll with an obvious partisan goal. Lots of other sites disagree with me? Clearly they're just shills. Someone points out I don't know the difference between a russian and a ukrainian? How would you know unless you're a russian bot! The gibberish of a monkey with a typewriter would be defended if the monkey had the right political leanings. We accept the shortcomings of many institutions because the ends justify the means, even though those ends could have been achieved with better means.

[tzs]

> The problem with US media is not the bias (and indeed there are plenty that go ridiculously far to be "fair" to both sides), but the laziness.

After Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, I heard a discussion on NPR where they talked about failures of the coverage of the primaries [1]. There were a lot of candidates in the Republican primaries: besides Trump there was Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie, and a few others.

The reporters in the field covering each candidate would send in items, both positive and negative, about all the candidates.

For all the candidates except Trump, they were seeing about the same ratio of positive to negative. For Trump, the ratio of positive things he did/said to negative things was quite a bit lower than that of other candidates.

The editors and producers had an implicit assumption that all candidates would be about the same in this regard and so killed a lot of the negative Trump items so as to keep in line with the number of negatives for the other candidates.

It wasn't until after Trump had locked up the nomination that they realized that Trump really did do/say more negative newsworthy things than the others, and that in trying to avoid bias or the appearance of bias they had actually introduce a pro-Trump bias.

[1] For those not familiar with the US system, each major party holds elections to determine who its nominees will be, and then those nominees compete with the nominees from the other parties in the general election.

[zwieback]

In fact, when I was growing up in Germany there was a discussion about whether the US' noble goals of achieving a balanced media was possible or even desirable. The general agreement was that recognizing news sources implicit bias made more sense than trying to balance out reporting. This was in the 70s and 80s, I've been away from Germany for so long now I have no idea which direction things have taken there.

[raxxorrax]

I think if you arithmetically add a US and a Russian article and divide it by two, you are as informed as if you had read them separately. Obvious advantage: You can read two articles in one.

[asjdflakjsdf]

I just mean for news that comes directly from US sources. I find things like the Wuhan lab theory to be fascinating, worrying and plausable. But I struggle to find any reliable information about it because (not just, but mainly) US publications have saturated the media with politically driven articles instead of just trying to get to the bottom of it.

I get the impression that most Americans see the rest of the world like some form of a cartoon. They are weirdly detached from the reality of it all. I even get that impression when speaking to regular Americans about other countries and I think the media feeds on, and feeds, this incredibly strange outlook.

If there is any truth to the Wuhan lab leak story, it is an incredibly important thing for every single human on the planet. The idea of a country purposfully, or accidentally, releasing a lab made virus is such a massive threat to every society in the world, even worse than chernobyl, that we need the story to be scrutinised and and reported on with perfect accuracy. Instead, it has somehow become a fuel left/right wing driven click-bait. The articles I have come across on this subject have been pretty much baseless nonsense, or incredibly untrustworthy, and that is just scary.

Europe has problems of course, but it is definitely better. They are partisan but they are less at taking digs at the opposition. America seems to be going through a media war. In the UK it is pretty rotten too, but the writing is usually more accurate and one can find well researched articles.

The most striking thing for me during covid was when it started to make daily news in the US. Up until that point, I felt like I had a really good understanding of what was going on. I found there to be a lot of scientific reporting making it to the mainstream etc.. As soon as it reached America though, it was game over. I was lost. I genuinely just couldn't follow what was going on because of all the noise generated by US media, which inevitably spills over, and intertwines, with all other media.

I probably can't explain it very well, but the amount of noise in American news just seems to drown out anything that can actually help regular people get a grasp on what is actually happening.

[read_if_gay_]

> They are partisan but they are less at taking digs at the opposition.

Funny, just yesterday I got convinced of the opposite. So yesterday Germany played Hungary in the European Soccer Championship; before that Hungary passed some anti-gay legislation and in response some German activists wanted to light the Munich stadium up in rainbow colors, which UEFA ultimately forbid.

Watching the match on ZDF (the most well known German TV channel), literally 50% of halftime was spent talking about how great of an effort that was. There was zero talk about the actual game (and there was enough to talk about), instead they showed people handing out rainbow flags and snippets of interviews, where everyone basically agreed that "soccer is unpolitical but the Hungarians definitely crossed a line with this law."

They never mentioned the actual law. Hungary banned homosexuality from children's movies. If you ask me that's about as softcore as homophobia gets, yet everyone in the segment was completely dramatic, like the Hungarians were going to deport gay people or something. The whole thing was devoid of actual information, instead basically just repeating "Hungary bad! UEFA bad! Activists good! Everyone agrees!" (keep in mind, without telling you what Hungary even did!) It was kind of surreal to watch, completely unlike what you would expect from a reputable TV station, and utterly out of the blue if you just followed the sport casually. Definitely a cheap stab at the opposition.

[ToFab123]

I specifically wait The Guardian. That newspaper has gained my trust because of Snowden.

[Nursie]

The Guardian is openly biased. But it is at least open.

That's not to say its reporting on the facts is wrong, but its editorials are very definitely partisan and what they choose to report/how they choose to report it often shows this too.

In general it's my favourite news source, but you do have to account for its slant.