Well, my post on FOX News seems to have hit a nerve. Some of the responses were very helpful, others were, to be charitable, not so helpful.
I ask this from the bottom of my heart. How do I determine the veracity of the information in my media feed? FOX News, Clinton News Network, ABC News and even Univision (I’m fluent in Spanish) all seem to me to be pushing their own agenda.
It gets worse when you get on social media. The internet is practically Spain 1936 , with lots of people screaming and at the point of taking up arms. Before I start practicing at the range, though, I’d like to know what’s going on.
I trust Al-Jazeera, out of all the “classic” media outlets just about the only one. But I’m just an asshole, dependent as anyone on the contents of my screen. I’m tired of being told who to hate. I have enough people in my 3D life to dislike without worrying about imaginary people who want to put my son in a dress and sodomize him or put my wife’s gay hair stylist into a Gulag.
All of that said, I realize that a sitting President ignoring a Supreme Court ruling is dangerous territory. Things could go sideways fast. I don’t need to be provoked. I need to be informed
Maybe I should post this on r/conservative too.
Comments
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
Well, my post on FOX News seems to have hit a nerve. Some of the responses were very helpful, others were, to be charitable, not so helpful.
I ask this from the bottom of my heart. How do I determine the veracity of the information in my media feed? FOX News, Clinton News Network, ABC News and even Univision (I’m fluent in Spanish) all seem to me to be pushing their own agenda.
It gets worse when you get on social media. The internet is practically Spain 1936 , with lots of people screaming and at the point of taking up arms. Before I start practicing at the range, though, I’d like to know what’s going on.
I trust Al-Jazeera, out of all the “classic” media outlets just about the only one. But I’m just an asshole, dependent as anyone on the contents of my screen. I’m tired of being told who to hate. I have enough people in my 3D life to dislike without worrying about imaginary people who want to put my son in a dress and sodomize him or put my wife’s gay hair stylist into a Gulag.
All of that said, I realize that a sitting President ignoring a Supreme Court ruling is dangerous territory. Things could go sideways fast. I don’t need to be provoked. I need to be informed
Maybe I should post this on r/conservative too.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
Most media is opinion based. They are giving you a story and telling you how to feel about it. That can range from whoever replaced Tucker Carlson over at FOX to Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. Go for news that are hitting the first 4 W’s (Who, What, When and Where) and less on the last W (Why Important).
Being informed with minimal spin you want options like Nightly News with Lester Holt, World News Tonight with David Muir, etc.
I like AP News. The only two Twitter accounts I still follow are AP News and a local severe weather alert one (bluesky still doesn’t have alerts/notifications afaik and that’s kind of important for the weather one, so I’ll switch once that’s enabled).
What are you asking?
If you’re asking what is a healthy way to consume news media, its really simple. Get your news from multiple sources, be aware of their biases, and factor that into how you process the information.
Honestly, this isn’t hard. When ever I see conservatives complaining that all news media is equally terrible it normally is because they want an excuse to avoid facts that challenge their world view.
I would focus a lot more on our own internal biases than the biases of the news you consume tbh
There are no perfectly unbiased news sources. You’ll have to use commonsense on which one is being the most reasonable and one best way to do it is to figure out how much opinion is being pushed in their reporting vs the plain facts. However if you insist, I think AP is good. Regarding American news, reputable foreign sources would be good, DW, Nikkei Asia etc. Also take a look at Ground News. I don’t think they are perfect, but they have an interesting model and aggregator.
>My epistemological crisis
>…
>How do I determine the veracity of the information in my media feed?
You have to sort news sources into different categories.
> FOX News, Clinton News Network, ABC News and even Univision (I’m fluent in Spanish) all seem to me to be pushing their own agenda.
I don’t know anything about Univision, so I won’t comment on them.
CNN and ABC News may have their biases, but it will be shown in subtle ways. They will cover one subject more, and another subject less. They will not straight-up lie to you.
Fox News will straight-up lie to you. They have claimed in court that “you can’t expect to literally believe the words” that they broadcast. (They were in court because they had broadcast lies, and someone was trying to sue them for defamation. You can read more about it, and see the text I quoted, here.)
You can trust Al Jazeera on almost everything except for anything in Qatar.
BBC world News podcast is a lot better than ABC world news and NBC nightly news.
Less covered stories are often found on DropSite News. They broke a couple of pretty big stories too. AP News is decent.
Just pay attention to which agencies get targeted negatively by governments maybe even bombed, and you’ll start to notice who has balls to report on stories that endangers the manufactured support for those in power.
Do you mind if I ask where you get off pretending to care about epistemology when you use weasel phrases like “hit a nerve?”
For some one who is worried about being told to hate, you sure are letting Clinton be in your head rent free. Clinton hasn’t been relevant in politics for almost a decade now. CNN covered her negative press during her email scandal, so I’m not even sure how far back we have to go for your hatred? Is it 2+ decades? Let it go…
A good rule of thumb is that if it’s on television on a 24 hour news cycle it’s completely worthless. All televised news is shit to varying degrees. Fox News is the worst because it was founded with the goal of deceiving people and does very little otherwise. Calling CNN Clinton News Network is totally inaccurate considering the station is owned by a Trump supporter.
I’ve heard good things about Ground News. My personal media diet consists of big papers /news orgs like Reuters, Washington Post, the Guardian, AP, the Atlantic, and others.
If you have to watch it on TV PBS newshour, 60 minutes, and Frontline are the least terrible but all televised news is a sewer that will make you dumber to some extent.
It is also worth watching C-SPAN on occasion.
> I ask this from the bottom of my heart. How do I determine the veracity of the information in my media feed?
There really isn’t a way to be certain. However, in addition to your right wing sources, also check multiple, mainstream news outlets (there are several good suggestions for those in this thread), assuming you have the time. If they’re all reporting the same story, then there’s probably some legitimacy to it.
My go-to is the BBC website. They cover US news extensively and are very objective in their reporting. Britain takes defamation much more seriously than we do in the US and has stronger laws to protect against misinformation/disinformation online. I trust them implicitly with fact reporting.
The other news sources that I would consider reasonably trustworthy are NPR, Reuters, Politico, and the Atlantic. All have a good reputation for fact-checking. Analysis/commentary tends to be centrist, but they get wrongly labeled as “left-leaning” outlets because of how heavily they cover issues in the Trump administration.
I totally hear you. I think the internet is a wild space, and pretty much everyone is pushing an agenda. I don’t think it is healthy.
I will say one thing about CNN to FOX. There is generally a split between news and opinion, and there are not that many out right factual disagreements between news agencies. If we are getting to a very specific piece of information, it generally is the same on a wide range of news sources.
NOW – what is hugely different is the spin, analysis, (aka the opinion side) and most importantly what is even lifted up as news. I was very struck, that as the stock market was crashing due to Trump’s imposition of tariffs, RedState, Brietbart, Newsmax, Fox News, all either didn’t mention the stock market, or had it buried deep deep. In contrast New York Times, CNN, Wall Street Journal, all had it front and center. On the flip side, Austin Metcalf’s stabbing was front and center in all of those conservative news sources (here for example is the breathless updates on this important case: https://nypost.com/2025/04/16/us-news/karmelo-anthony-renting-900k-home-in-gated-community-with-family-bought-new-car-after-release-on-bond-in-austin-metcalf-murder-case-report/,
the level of wild speculation and barely hidden racist claims (how DARE he be in a nice home)).
One solution I try to practice is to find a variety of news sources that I find intellectually consistent and generally are not pushing a totally uniform political agenda. I listen to the National Review Podcast, Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat’s Interesting times, and Economists. I read the New York Times, Meet the Press, Wall Street Journal, Vox, the Economist and CNN. I try and sneak around Reddit subs that range from askTrumpSupporters, and fans of Rogan.
I also try and separate out what has happened and what could happen. A lot of news report out what COULD happen as a result of X. I try to just focus on what specific has happened.
Finally, I think it is helpful to look at history. Much of what Trump is doing, is what FDR did as well. Much of the searching for a villain is what happened during the Red Scare. We are the nation of Jim Crow and Credit-Default Swaps, and we have survived. Most Americans, left and right, are good people, who want safe and productive lives. We have to figure out how to be the more dominate voice.
Honestly, my first piece of advise would be to stop getting news from TV and social media entirely – you’re basically always going to be better off reading the news than watching it. After that you’ll probably want to cultivate a list of organizations or even individual writers whose analysis you mostly trust, either because they’ve proven themselves to be reliable or because you at least understand their bias/perspective (and understanding that this can vary by subject).
Sources and memory. Sorry but it’s often that simple.
This is Trump’s second failed Trump war but he says he’s gonna win it.
The gop has worsened the debt for decades with tax cuts and the gop just announced new tax cuts and it’s a party of billionaires in the white house demanding subservience but he promises he’s going to fight the elite?
Transphobia but there’s a dozen nations of data showing transition helps people and they care more about bullying them while never doing anything FOR athletes.
There’s tricky topics but honestly a lot is easy to research.
>Clinton News Network
That’s probably a bad sign. Both that you imply it’s correct or that you view CNN as a overall good source of news.
You are on the right and can recognize there is something wrong with the President ignoring the Supreme Court. So … Go get a subscription to the Atlantic and read your news and opinion. Add the NY Times if you want more general default news. And if you need podcasts, subscribe to the main Bulwark podcast with Tim Miller.
> Clinton News Network
Well OP is clearly a serious person
Honestly? The best way is to just use a number of sources and try to determine what the truth is by triangulation, or simply rely on something like Reuters or the AP and get a very matter of fact, straightforward “this is what happened” and draw your own conclusions.
I.E. Don’t let the news tell you what your opinion should be, just what occurred.
I always like to use situations when I have all the facts to judge my media sources.
For example, during the first Trump administration, there was an article about a series of tweets about Eric Trump and a Russian lawyer, and I could see the tweets, and read them myself, and see who reported correctly on the tweets.
Fox came out badly, as they didn’t publish anything until they had the Trump POV counter-point, and Fox didn’t specify a key point: it wasn’t that the lawyer was Russian, it was that she was a Russan **government** lawyer.
An easy way to start is dismissing any news source that has argued in court that they are “entertainment” that is so ridiculous and nonsensical that no reasonable person would believe it.
You know, like Fox News has.
You independently verify it. That means finding the source the news got it from and reading it yourself. If it’s a claim of fact, look the fact up in as close to a primary source as you can get.
You explore counterarguments. What are the biggest arguments that would contradict what you heard? If the counterargument is true, what would that look like? Is the evidence there to support the counterargument?
You explore context. Learn more about the place the event occurred in. Learn more about the people involved.
My suggestion if you want good news coverage of the states, look at news networks from outside of the states. CBC is pretty renowned for thier unbiased approach to news, especially dealing with other countries. Look at British stations or australlian news stations and how they are covering events happening in the states. An outsiders perspective typically is more biased than someone on the inside.
I know all legit media sources do not tell the whole story and I know all legit media sources have leanings.
The thing is I don’t trust them. Why would I listen to Jesse watters on tariffs or economics? Why would I listen to maddows on foreign policy?
I suggest you take history, finance and economic classes and draw your own conclusions.
There is a reason I went from conservative to liberal.
I recommend you look into Ground News. It’s genuinely bipartisan, advertising across both sides of the aisle, and can tell you how the sources lean, if they’re owned by a big corporation, individual, the rate of factuality, and more. Here’s stuff about the Google monopoly, for a good example.
I pay for a subscription, as it’s even more in depth than the free version. Honestly, I would recommend it for anyone who wants to know what bias their sources have. The best way to find veracity is to do some digging. Look up multiple sources for the same issue and read the articles and parse the differences.
I also like Al-Jazeera (except when they’re reporting on the middle east). I think it’s a good healthy step to be tired of being told who to hate. We shouldn’t be hating each other– we should be working towards a common goal of being the best we can be.
I do want to talk about your “imaginary people” a little– you are right, no one wants to sodomize your son or put him in a dress. And while no one is currently pushing to put your wife’s gay hairstylist in the gulag, the right-wing extremists in the GOP are seeking to destroy LGBTQ+ rights in the US, not just the rights of trans people. This starts with erasure. We’ve got minorities across the span between LGBTQ+ and race and religion being removed from our history and general day to day life– once you start removing this kind of information, you can further paint hatred against groups (which you’ve clearly noticed). This is an easy to prove fact.
Are you familiar with the AllSides media bias chart? I try to stick to sources near the top/middle. I like NPR, BBC World, and Financial Times. They’re not _free_ of bias, but they tend to be free of misinformation and more importantly disinformation (unlike certain FOX outlets, particularly TV). No individuals are free of bias, at all, I suppose.
AP News, Reuters, BBC, in addition to other non-Fox US sources.
Allsides.com/mediabias is a pretty good starting point. AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg are all wire services that are considered down the middle and fact-based.
Unfortunately AP is now kicked out of the Oval Office press briefings for continuing to use “Gulf of Mexico” in their publication, even as the White House continues to defy a court order to let them in. Kudos to them for refusing to bend the truth and kiss the ring.
Media literacy and critical thinking skills are muscles that get stronger the more you flex them, and sadly no one gets ripped after only going to the gym for a week. These things take time; know and accept that going in.
I think it would help to get introspective, and really sit down and ask yourself how you judge things to be true or false, generally, in your own life; what makes something “sound” true or false in your head and in your gut? Do you think the way that currently happens might be flawed in some way? What kinds of things have caused you to change your opinions in the past? What does your brain tend to do when information comes in that contradicts something you felt strongly about?
These are questions only you can answer.