Where To Get News

1/23/17: If you want to know what’s really going on, beware social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Move away from news bites and start digesting longform sustenance from well-informed reporters.

I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world. To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion. So I’m not just staying off Twitter, I’m cutting back on the news sites in my RSS feed, and deleting browser bookmarks to newspapers. Instead, I am turning more of my attention to monthly magazines, quarterly journals, and books. I’m trying to get a somewhat longer view of things — trying to start thinking about issues one when some of the basic facts about them have been sorted out. Taking the short view has burned me far too many times; I’m going to try to prevent that from happening ever again (even if I will sometimes fail). And if once in a while I end up fighting a battle in a war that has already ended … I can live with that. – Alan Jacobs

8/11/16: I frequently get stuck in a rut visiting the same news sources. So I’m trying to create a list of authoritative sites for cycling through and seeing beyond my progressive bias. As one Redditor put it,

There’s no such thing as unbiased news. What you can do is check several different reputable sources regularly and cross-check what they say.

Where do you get your news? Leave a comment below of your favorite sources. Here are a few points of reference I’m gathering as resources for gleaning what’s really going on.

• Daily News
  • Al Jazeera, US
  • All Sides
  • Alternet
  • BBC News
  • C-Span
  • Christian Science Monitor
  • Democracy Now
  • Google News
  • Jane’s 360
  • Politico
  • ProPublica
  • Public Integrity
  • Talking Points Memo
  • The Center for Public Integrity
  • The Economist – paywall
  • The Guardian
  • The Independent, UK
  • The New York Times – paywall
  • The Real News
  • The Wall Street Journal – paywall
  • The Washington Post
  • Vox
  • Wiki News
  • ZFacts
• Feeds
  • Very Quiet
•  Podcasts
  • More Perfect
  • On The Media
  • This American Life
• Magazines
  • The Atlantic
  • Harpers
  • Mother Jones
  • The New Republic
  • The New Yorker
• Austin, TX
  • Austin Business Journal
  • Austin Chronicle
  • Austin Monitor
  • Community Impact
  • Texas Tribune

This chart is an interesting indicator of trust by political affiliation. The clear first place winner is the Wall Street Journal, with the BBC and Google News tied for second.