Ontopic The Shooting Thread

... aggregated by motherfuckin reddit. Which i fully realize is biased as shit.
I used to do this and stopped too. Now if I hear a headline and I care to know more, I'll research it. Snopes, Wiki references, journals, some other sites known for their facts and not so much their ratings.

It's a pain in the fucking ass, I tell you.
 
Most of my news feed is provided by Flipboard app. It's shitty and seems to lean left but actually I could care less.

If an actual headline grabs my attention and I want more than the AP sound bites, I might flip the cable news on starting with CNN and Fox then surfing up through MSNBC and back again to try and filter through the bias.
One can't filter through the bias.
 
I used to do this and stopped too. Now if I hear a headline and I care to know more, I'll research it. Snopes, Wiki references, journals, some other sites known for their facts and not so much their ratings.

It's a pain in the fucking ass, I tell you.
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Many people get all their news from late night comedy and their alt Facebook feed.
Troof.

& this 'late night' stuff isn't all that 'late night.' It's clips of the show designed to be viewed and shared later on social media. After Letterman bailed that was one of the things he said he couldn't figure out. He said all the new guys are great with the skits designed for youtube clips and he's old school.
 
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That is an interesting read.

Pretty much confirmed everything I thought about fox news having lived in a house where a 50 year old watched it all day and all night. I always thought it strange that he could watch a "news channel" where all the ladies were top of the line in appearance and everyone was always upset and yelling at how wrong the "liberals" are. Talking about how out of touch those dumb liberals are with the real world and how the average liberal voter was either a black man that shoots cops or confused white people who defended the black man who shoots cops simply because he's black.

That's not to say any of the other big media outlets are any better, but Fox pretty much shoves it in your face.
 
I used to do this and stopped too. Now if I hear a headline and I care to know more, I'll research it. Snopes, Wiki references, journals, some other sites known for their facts and not so much their ratings.

It's a pain in the fucking ass, I tell you.
I still use reddit, but I set it up to show me content from all biases and not sort by up votes but rather date of submission. Gives you a much greater understanding of where everyone is coming from which leads to being able to spot bullshit in the mainstream
 
More than just biased it's also, by design, more likely to show you the clickbaity material because the attributes that make something clickbaity for views are the same that cause people to upvote/digg/gravy posts. You're going to be shown a wider range of views but also a wider range of journalistic quality. The solution is to follow journalists themselves or the organizations they work for.

You read through the washington post or the ny times or the wall street journal or the hill or the national review or the guardian and you look at their record. You look at a reporter's record and see how many times they got it wrong vs how many times they got it right. Sometimes a journalist decides to put their career on the line and lie about something. If that happens most of the time then that person isn't to be trusted and they'll often be fired from reputable outlets. If the place that publishes their work has more than a few of those examples then maybe that isn't a place to trust.

But if that reporter gets things right 9 times out of 10 but every once in awhile a source turns out to be bullshit or lying then you can adjust your expectations. Reporters fuck up just like anyone else but its their track record that determines the level of their credibility. You can approach their reporting with an idea of how reliable their information is, how good they are at sourcing their reports, how good they are at picking up on a source feeding them bullshit, and how much of a bias they have in their reporting.

Now if you're looking for a reporter without any bias, one that will only ever report facts without putting some kind of perspective on it then you are looking for a complete fantasy. Every report, every statement, every fact will have a bias based solely on how it's presented and the context provided. And you can't present a fact without context because everyone is hard wired to fill in the context our monkey brains demand.

No news organization will ever be perfect but you can rely more on the reporters with a 9/10 track record than those with a 1/10. But you have to put in the leg work to make that determination. That's how a free press works. It's not about trying to work around active deception but understanding and accepting that sometimes human beings fuck up.

If I hear the word "news" and the only thing I think are "CNN, Fox News, MSNBC" then the problem isn't the news, the problem is me.

Shouldn't require anywhere near that much time and effort just to get some information that isn't bullshit.