I generally try to stay informed on current events. With the exception of what gets posted here, I normally get my news from CNN. I tend to lean left politically, but not always.
The problem I always run into is that every news site I read, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, is always filled with pointless bullshit. Specifically, sports, celebrity news, and product placement. “Some shitty pop singer is dating some shitty actor” or “These are our recommendations for the best mass-produced garbage-quality fast fashion from Temu” or “Some overpaid dickhead threw a ball faster than some other overpaid dickhead.”
What I’d love to find is a news source that’s just news that matters. No celebrity gossip, sports, opinion pieces, etc. Just real events that have an impact on some part of the world. Legislation, natural events, economic changes, wars, political changes, that kind of thing.
Does this exist, or is all journalism just entertainment?
Every news agency will have an inherent bias. There is no such thing as purely objective news without a perspective. However, you can learn to identify the biases, cross reference news with different sources, especially ones from different countries to see other perspectives, and then think about the topics yourself to get a deeper understanding.
This is the way. It’s a ton off work and often, you have to be willing to be wrong about what you thought you knew going into a subject. Approaching news from multiple perspectives reveals your own biases too.
The perfect news source for me would be a single, trustworthy aggregator that showed me several perspectives on every story, all in the same place. That doesn’t exist though.
there are some attempts like ground.news but I agree they leave a lot to be desired and tend to completely ignore non western sources
I’ve had great experiences with reading socialist news sites. They tend not to care about ‘the spectacle’ and don’t like ads. Although you still have to avoid the ones like WSWS who just use it as a platform to call other socialists ‘pseudo-left’.
Side note: There’s a great famous analysis of the US media in the book Manufacturing Consent. You can find a PDF online, but at the very very very least you should read the Wikipedia summary. It explains the reasons why media organisations almost inevitably have some of these biases and bullshits.
WSWS?
“World Socialist Web Site”, the paper of the Socialist Equality Party (who, in my personal experience, are toxic idealists who will counterprotest pickets and any union action whatsoever)
Removed by mod
Sounds like you’re looking for independent journalism, I’m in the same boat. I’ve found checking commondreams.org, scheerpost.com, therealnews.com, unicornriot.ninja, fair.org, thecanary.co, leftvoice.org, consortiumnews.com, labornotes.org, and popularresistance.org make for a great news feed. Those are an array of independent news outlets which keep it almost entirely just news. Setting up an RSS feed with these sites would be a solid move to ensure your getting news with none of the BS.
I’m having a hard time getting their URL feeds. I think your post is very useful. Since you mentioned the RSS feed, could you share the links, please? It would be awesome if you can spare the time. Thanks.
I just use radindiemedia.com as my source for these news feeds. It’s curated by an activist who also mixes in some of his work as well as a few other news sources. But those sites make up the vast majority of the links.
Oh, that’s it. Thank you very much.
I would add Grist to that list for climate focused reporting.
Id probably use AP (Associated Press) since they seem to provide the least biased and most fact based reporting. However looking at their front page right now I see minimal content involving celebrities so it might not be your cup of tea.
I have the AP Top Stories page as my bookmark. It gets rid of even more of the stuff OP doesn’t want.
Only borderline story is about Taylor Swift and food banks, but the focus is on the economics and other issues food banks face, so I feel it is still within guidelines. There’s no celeb drama or gushing in it.
This and my local NPR affiliate are my primary news sources.
Neither Reuters nor AP pass the Uyghur test. They may be less biased than others but they’re still fake news and propaganda outlets.
I think what you’re describing is the need for RSS feeds. Generally, news outlets categorise their articles neatly so you subscribe with RSS to only headlines, or world events, or whatever. It requires you to have a look around the news site in question and setup RSS correctly.
The other neat thing is that you can read all your RSS feeds (ie multiple news sites) in one reader and there are tons of custom RSS apps.
I share your disdain for gossip and mainstream money grab promo. And ads. My god how much do ads suck.
It’s funny how often this is brought up and how the answer is that’s it’s been solved since nearly the begging of the web.
I’ve been using an RSS manager / server for decades! Right now it’s FreshRSS as the server and using Lire as a client on iOS. There’s arguably no better way to consume content.
RSS won’t solve OP’s problem. Most sites have a single feed with all their articles, if they have an rss feed at all (can’t sell ads in an rss feed).
Aside from maybe just the raw AP feed (which is free through their app) I’m not sure any modern news room just publishes the type of feed OP might be looking for.
I think that really depends on the news site. News from my country is very well suited for RSS.
100% yeah. I guess I mean that OP is already frustrated by noise in their news sources, rss doesn’t solve curation, which is what it sounds like people think rss does. But if every story you’re shown needs to be relevant to your interests rss isn’t going to fix that.
Even the perfect news outlet that OP describes is going to have tons of boring stuff. Social media tried solving it with algorithms and will probably move on to AI driven feeds in 18 months, but their profit motive spoils the effort.
Then again I’ve thought about curation vs. aggregation maybe a bit too much.
I’m subscribed to over 50 RSS feeds and never once have I wanted to subscribe to a site and they didn’t have a feed.
I can recommend Reuters, given it still has a little bit of sports and opinion, but I find it’s good at providing neutral facts and sources it’s knowledge from appropriate experts for its opinion pieces.
It only lacks in providing local level news, where I turn to my country’s national broadcaster.
providing neutral facts and sources it’s knowledge from appropriate experts for its opinion pieces.
Such as Adrian Zenz. A guy who was paid by the BBC to make up absurd stories about China and who thinks god sent him on a mission to rid the world of gays and communists.
No idea about this dude, but literally in the article you link, they reference Zenz as an independent researcher who says:
“Although it is speculative…”
Before providing his estimate and also provides other details which appear to support the story, but the article does not present as clear, hard “facts”. Also, the title isn’t some clickbait trash, and even directly says “could”.
A guy who vows to destroy all gays isn’t “speculative”
Seconding Reuters. Their primary customers are other news agencies, so Reuters generally don’t add spin to a news article.
I guess AP is similar.
IIRC those are like the big two in reselling stories.
Yep, they are called news agencies.
Thank you!
Apparently “Agence France-Presse” or AFP is the third one, at least if you speak French.
NPR News is probably what you’re looking for. sports and celebrity stuff is relegated to the Culture section, which is its own separate thing (although there are a couple of music stories that seem to have been misplaced). here is the RSS feed for the News section: https://feeds.npr.org/1001/rss.xml
For US news, I really like readtangle.com.
News is a service that determines what’s newsworthy and summarizes it. You can’t do that without bias at some level.
I really wish there was a news source with coverage weighted by humanitarian impact.
That might actually be too far in the other direction for what you’re thinking of, though. Most political news wouldn’t be there, just because it’s hard to draw a direct line objectively to the impact it has. Many sites provide categories and filters, so maybe just using those more would be a start.
Sounds like you might just want the news without fluff.
I use AllSides as my main news source for federal news. Give them a try. The writing is succinct and gets straight to the point.
They give you news of the day in small chunks separated by topic. Each topic has a quick context, run down of what’s happening, and (my favorite) how the left right and center outlets are all covering it.
They also have an RSS feed (provided by Open RSS because they dont serve their own feeds. https://openrss.org/allsides.com
Short and to the point, with sources. Headlines grouped by categories
Before cable news and before there was such an appetite for political news, real news sources were very diverse. Every newspaper had a sports section and an entertainment section. Also opinion was in the opinion or op-ed section. Nowadays I’m more leary of news sources that are strictly political news. Everyone has a Washington DC correspondent. Lots of news sites will buy all of their news outside of DC from a wire service or even sometimes their story is “reporting” what another agency is reporting. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways but I prefer the traditional well rounded sources. Others just seem cheap and have an agenda
everyone has and always had an agenda.
Aside from that, generally I can agree, the commodification of news and profit-seeking, as often is the case, have ruined everything.
Bloomberg news tends to only have the kind of news you’re referring to.
