[rossdavidh]

The difference between British and U.S. mainstream news sources, in regards to covid-19, is that you would be a lot less likely to see the NYTimes or Washington Post or etc. run any story with anything resembling positive news. While the BBC, Guardian, etc. can certainly make mistakes, I don't get nearly as strong an impression of a heavy-handed filter on what information I'm being given. With U.S. mainstream news, I very much do.

[fullshark]

Those newspapers and their like blame themselves for getting Trump elected by focusing too much on Hilary's emails in 2016. As a result they became openly activist over the past 5 years, and wouldn't publish this story because they wouldn't want to publish anything that possibly would convince vaccine holdouts to remain unvaccinated. They are now subscription services mostly built around feeding the confirmation bias of their subscribers, if they published this story they'd get a lot of complaints from their readers about how dangerous it was and they were going to get people killed.

[pokot0]

I am one of those subscribers and while I feel the same many times, I can't find any better source of general information than the NYTimes. Any suggestion? Where do you find unbiased information nowadays?

[gonehome]

I don’t know about unbiased, but seeking out smart individuals who try to be correct has worked the best for me (and then Axios for general news updates, SF Chronicle for local).

Some quick ones:

- Stay Tuned with Preet (legal policy stuff)

- Persuasion with Yascha Mounk (nuanced policy and politics, liberalism)

- Making Sense with Sam Harris (nuanced discussions on culture war topics, but other interesting stuff too).

- Noah Smith Substack

- Money Stuff with Matt Levine (finance)

- Stratechery (best tech analysis)

- Rationally Speaking with Julia Galef

- The Diff (more financial and company analysis)

- The Weekly Dish with Andrew Sullivan (center right, but reasonable - gives me a nuanced perspective on issues I may hold different positions on)

- Coleman Hughes has been interesting too.

- Astral Codex Ten (not really news, but an insightful blog on a wide variety of topics).

- Tyler Cowen and Marginal Revolution

- Balaji Srinivasan on Twitter (not news, but usually interesting and forward looking), same thing applies to others on Twitter if you can find them.

Any of these is 10x better than something like the NYT, on a regular basis. The MSM writing and discussion isn’t even close in complexity or depth. MSM anchors don’t seem as smart (imo) and are mostly preaching to their own choir with whatever motivated reasoning they need to do so.

[pokot0]

Wow. This is a beautiful list to go through. Thanks a lot. The only one I knew and read at times is Matt Levine. I'll try the others.... this is when I wish rss feed were still with us....

Thanks again!

[gonehome]

No worries - there’s a lot there, but I’ve been happy with the variety.

Some others that I forgot are the 538 podcast, Bari Weiss, and the new Joe Lonsdale YouTube channel.

[reducesuffering]

AP, Reuters, and Astral Codex Ten are as good as it gets, not perfect. The rest, you're just going to have to run an intersection on what they don't disagree on for a starting point. The rest of stuff they disagree on, revisit who's predictions were more accurate or not.

[rossdavidh]

I subscribe to an email newsletter called 1440. It is a news curator, more than reporter, but it gives me a broad cross-section of the news, without a lot of obvious bias, and it's readable in 5 minutes a morning or so. https://join1440.com/

[TheAdamAndChe]

I haven't found anywhere that is largely unbiased nowadays. I subscribe to a single mailing list that emails me news cliffnotes every day, but nowadays I'm largely unplugged.

[rossdavidh]

Would this be 1440, by any chance?

[TheAdamAndChe]

Yes, actually. It's pretty great.

[fullshark]

Personally I think there's no such thing as an unbiased information stream/newspaper. What stories you promote/ignore and how you frame them is a source of bias and it's impossible to avoid as you or any algorithm simply must make editorial decisions. To paint with a broad brush NYTimes is probably the best source of the American left's perspective, WSJ is probably the best source of the right's IMO.

[wutbrodo]

I don't know that that's true. I quickly spot-checked this with NPR (a closer analogue to the BBC) by Googling "npr children covid". The first two results were neutral factual information about current CDC guidelines, and the very first result with a narrative angle was "In kids, the risk of covid-19 and flu are similar, but the risk perception isn't".

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999241558/in-kids-the-risk-of...

[the_lonely_road]

In a discussion like this ‘reach’ and ‘impact’ are the critical axises that have to be discussed. Both Fox and CNN websites might have the same article if you Google the specific thing but one of them ran it in the front page for 24 hours while the other put it as link number 100 after you have scrolled down and clicked more a few times. Millions of Americans will see one of those articles while maybe a few hundred Americans will see the other. I wish there was some kind of service that provided access to measurements on the reach and impact of different topics by the different news agencies, it would be illuminating on their individual biases.

[swiley]

Right, a closer British analogue for the NYT would probably be the daily mail.

[rossdavidh]

You may be correct. Once upon a time, in my lifetime, the NYTimes _was_ the analog to the BBC, and at least to the Guardian, but perhaps what has changed is that the place in the American news spectrum that the NYT and WashPo are occupying is different.

[disgruntledphd2]

It's much more like the guardian than the BBC.

[bencollier49]

In fact, didn't the Guardian / Observer include some pages from the NYT, perhaps at the weekend, at one time? Perhaps they still do.