> I try to pinch my nose and read both parties' propaganda machines
There is a lot you can find that isn't in propaganda machines. One essential piece of propaganda is to say that everything is propaganda, like a liar saying everyone lies. The very good news is that, while nothing will meet a standard of perfection, there are excellent news sources - you have more access to quality news than anyone in history, thanks to the professionalization and expansion of journalism and to, of course, the Internet.
The first trick: Skip all opinion pieces. They are all BS from every side, IMHO.
Despite what those propagandists and opinion pieces say, the NY Times, Washington Post, and similar publications do provide quality news (don't read their opinion sections either).
> Despite what those propagandists and opinion pieces say, the NY Times, Washington Post, and similar publications do provide quality news (don't read their opinion sections either).
They do, but only on certain subjects they approve of. There are often major world or local events that are never covered in these outlets. Just to give some recent examples, the largest worker protests and strike in history happened in 2020 across India, and not 1 mainstream outlet in the US and UK covered it at all. Similarly, the miners' protests in NY were not covered in mainstream media.
I do agree that on the news they do cover, you can get decent facts from the papers you cite.
> the largest worker protests and strike in history happened in 2020 across India, and not 1 mainstream outlet in the US and UK covered it at all. Similarly, the miners' protests in NY were not covered in mainstream media.
I didn't see the New York miner protests in the NYT in a quick search, but I lack search terms and time. Do you mean the protests in support of Alabama miners?
I'm not saying that they don't miss stories and can't improve, a lot, but I think attacking journalism is trendy and normalized, and much of it is BS.
I have not found a single article about this in the NYT, BBC, Washington Post. The Guardian in the UK did cover these.
> Do you mean the protests in support of Alabama miners?
Yes, I mixed things up a bit. I have not been able to find an article about either the strike, nor the NYC protests about it. Rather amusingly, looking for UMWA or Alabama miner strikes, there are several articles about this, from ~1900s.
The main point I was making is that there is systematic bias on certain topics - especially workers' rights - in mainstream publications. There are other such topics as well, usually to do with the nitty gritty of US imperialism.
Well, media in the USA is often being accused of being left-leaning, when in fact it is almost universally right-of-center on almost every topic, except culture issues.
The claim is not necessarily that they ignore essential topics, so much as that they present a biased narrative of the world, even in the facts that they chose to cover at all - one biased against workers and against America's (perceived) enemies.
The people who accuse the NY Times of being biased towards liberals or progressives often forget how pro-war they were for example, how friendly they are to the military and security apparatus in general etc.
> Despite what those propagandists and opinion pieces say, the NY Times, ... do[es] provide quality news (don't read their opinion sections either).
You ever read Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent[1]? If you can't bring yourself to read the book, he made a film about it too [2]. But the book has hundreds of examples (well sourced) of why you should probably rethink that.
I'm mostly responding to attacks on the NYT from the right; it's interesting to think about it to a great extent. My first impression is that the NYT has broken from the 'consent manufacturing' apparatus, which is why so many 'moderates' attack it.
From a political point of view those are biased sources though, when 90+% of their journalists are self-proclaimed liberals this should be immediately obvious.
well when their job is to write about politics, do you really still think that is true? I'm not saying to disregard those sources as illegitimate, but take them with a grain of salt
There is a lot you can find that isn't in propaganda machines. One essential piece of propaganda is to say that everything is propaganda, like a liar saying everyone lies. The very good news is that, while nothing will meet a standard of perfection, there are excellent news sources - you have more access to quality news than anyone in history, thanks to the professionalization and expansion of journalism and to, of course, the Internet.
The first trick: Skip all opinion pieces. They are all BS from every side, IMHO.
Despite what those propagandists and opinion pieces say, the NY Times, Washington Post, and similar publications do provide quality news (don't read their opinion sections either).