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ABT generally has more analysis of news than even some
well established outlets.
When the networks realized that news broadcasts could be
a more lucrative source of income they changed the appearance
of the broadcasts. No more did you see scholarly men and women
like Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Morrow and Carol Simpson. Instead,
they begun to hire pretty people with marginal skills to read the news.
Slogans began to appear about how they were your friends. You could
trust them. They'll be by your (news) side. The news was pitched to the
public as entertainment with anchors cracking jokes and reporters doing
silly stories like cat weddings. What you see today is the harvested bounty
of rotten fruit that has resulted from greedy executive decisions. The movie
Broadcast News with William Hurt, Holly Hunter, and Albert Brooks is a great
look at the changing face of news.
I still rely on monthly news magazines, like the Economist. Online news sources kind of annoy me, as they seem to assume that people are visiting the site multiple times a day. A story worth reading might be archived within a few hours on news sites. I want a news source that I can read through once a month that gives me the big picture of what happened in the world for the past month - I have yet to see any online source that accomplishes this, so I still rely on my subscription to the Economist. Most of us are busy people who don't have time to hang out on a news website all day, wading through fluff to find news worth reading. The Economist is a fairly objective news source as well, and not too tainted by fluff like celebrity news.
PBS Newshour and Washington Week are pretty much it far as television is concerned IMHO.
Also international news such as France2 and BBC World.
American local and national news stations both cable and network are all owed by a handful of multinational companies and who keep them on a tight lead.
And I find that disconcerting. Why do you think that is?
Why? Because U.S. news services are all owned by corporate media conglomerates.
And "media" means every branch of show business as well as money-making operations far beyond show business — with purveying news as a way-down-the-ranks stepchild. ABC News is owned by Disney, for example. Anything Disney wants to promote, or on the other hand doesn't want talked about, is going to influence how ABC News operates.
On the news"paper" side, look at the Washington Post. It used to be an independent news source, the primary paper in our nation's capital. Sometime after the Washington Post spearheaded the breaking of the Watergate scandal, the Washington Post Company (which also owned Newsweek) expanded its operations and became the Graham Holding Company. In addition to buying a bunch of TV stations and other companies, they purchased Kaplan, Inc., "an international provider of educational and career services for individuals, schools, and businesses," i.e., FOR PROFIT education. Do you think you're going to get any opinions critical of the privatization of American education from the Washington Post anymore? No matter how crucial that news might be to the American public? And the people who are in favor of privatizing education are also in favor of privatizing prisons, the mail service, the running of local governments, the management of social services, etc., etc. So no way could you trust getting the straight skinny on any of those controversial issues from the Washington Post any longer: they had a financial stake in the game.
Even crazier, the Post — the one-time Hope Diamond of the Graham Family — had become its least unprofitable operation. A veritable albatross around the neck of the family's profit-obsessed Holding Company. So they spun it off. (With the late, great publisher Katharine Graham spinning in her grave, no doubt.) And who bought the for-sale Post just a couple of months ago? Jeff Bezos, billionaire founder of Amazon. Now what do you suppose he wants with one of America's most famous newspapers? You think he can be trusted to report what's going on in the world to you in an unbiased way?
I agree with those who say you are more likely to get unslanted news from Al Jazeera than from America's most powerful corporate interests. Corporate America wants you to "look over here at this shiny object" (e.g. the Kardashians and the latest Disney blockbuster) so you won't notice what kind of underhanded dealings they've got going on. It's in the public's interest for our news sources to be totally independent of connections to the creation of wealth. But they're not.
And I find that disconcerting. Why do you think that is?
Again, because they are not owed by GE, Disney, Time Warner and so forth.
It is becoming *VERY* rare to find any independent media of any sort including print in the USA. It seems all news media have an angle and or are pushing the view imposed from the owners. The New York Times is a classic example of a once great news source that has gone to rot. The Washington Post and a few others aren't that far behind either.
Clearest and most glaring example of how "low" American news media had fallen came during the run up and with coverage of Iraq War. When you watched, read, and or listened to say coverage from BBC World versus what ABC News was telling you it was like night and day. The New York Times later even issued an apology for how they handled their coverage.
I'll say it again, you are better off watching the offerings from PBS (Newshour, Washington Week, Frontline, etc....) if you want anything approaching unbiased, real and hard hitting journalism. They must be doing something right because Congress continues to try and reduce funding if not kill the service all together.
Obvious (it keeps the lights on) bias aside, The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia is still the gold standard in the United States. The multi-topic combination of news and features is a general store in a world of individual kiosks.
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One of those pieces of advice is almost as bad as the other. The New York Times had as much to do with selling the Invasion of Iraq to the American people as any news source in the country. Remember their star reporter Judith Miller? She went to jail to "protect" Scooter Libby, the man who would have done a nice jail sentence for the Valerie Plame affair (among other illegal favors he was doing for Cheney) had he not been pardoned by President Bush. (At least he was disbarred.) Judith Miller is a disgrace to journalism and she was the Times' idea of a writer to build an international news desk around. I'm not saying the Times is worthless from beginning to end, but they certainly can't be trusted to present unbiased international news to the public.
Another type of extreme is that crazy list provided by redwhiteblue1. We're supposed to trust FOX for our news when half of their headlines end in a question mark and they sue all the way to the Supreme Court for the "right" to lie and call it news if that's "more entertaining" than the truth? The Blaze, mouthpiece for Glenn Beck? World News Daily, which claims President Obama has 12 lovers and says we should vote for Rick Santorum for president? Seriously? Why don't we just read the paper that always has the Boy Raised by Bats on the cover?
American news has become infused with the entertainment factor to the point many find regular news somewhat boring..
If you want straight world news
BBC
Al Jezeera
CBC Canada
Avoid FOX news and CNN as they have drifted into the realms of news entertainment kinda like the journalistic equivalent of professional wrestling.
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