Where do you get your news of the world? Your news of the Church? Nothing deep and earthshaking to talk about here, just the practical problem of finding relatively unbiased news sources that are both informative and available. Let’s pool our knowledge and share some good sources.
A good place to start is a media bias chart that lets you know which way your favorite news sources lean left or right. In the AllSides chart, the center column includes the BBC, CNBC, and Newsweek. Leaning left is CNN and the Washington Post. Way left is the Atlantic and MSNBC. At the other end of the spectrum, leaning right is the Wall Street Journal and way right is Fox News and Newsmax.
The World and Politics. Apart from scanning the Yahoo news feed, I generally hit CNN, but CNN recently put about half their content behind a paywall. I’m still mulling over whether it’s worth $3.99 per month to get full CNN content again. A few years back I decided it was worth $3.99 a month to get full Washington Post content. I visit Fox News once in awhile just for fun, as well as TASS. Not much difference between Fox and TASS.
A couple of generations ago, there were many fewer news sources. If you subscribed to local city newspaper and Newsweek or Time, and watched the evening news on ABC, NBC, or CBS, you were fairly well informed from somewhere near the middle of the political spectrum. That’s harder to do now because it’s harder to find that relatively unbiased middle of the spectrum.
Social media algorithms push us to the left or to the right, depending on the stories and topics we click on. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a “give me unbiased news stories” button on Facebook? I’ll bet any junior software engineer on staff could program that in about 60 minutes. But they don’t want to do that. They don’t want us to spend 15 minutes scanning straightforward news. They want us to spend 100 minutes following threads and links that get us riled up and emotionally engaged. It takes real effort to say, “No, i want boring straightforward news,” then go find it.
YouTube offers a variety of clips and shows from all kinds of sources. Again, the trick is to find reliable sources and stories that are 5 or 7 minutes long, not 60 minutes.
News of the Church. This is a tougher task, largely because the only kind of news LDS leadership *wants* you and everyone else to read is their PR pieces. The Salt Lake Tribune is probably the best source for real news about the LDS Church (the stories LDS leadership doesn’t want you to read), but after a few free stories there is a paywall and I haven’t forked out for a subscription. The Deseret News offers puff pieces on the Church, just like it offers puff pieces on Trump.
I can think of a lot of straightforward LDS-related news that it is very hard or simply impossible to find. Things like missionary injuries or deaths, visa and international challenges, wards and stakes being consolidated, court cases involving local leaders or LDS crimes, statistics like number of baptisms, activity rates, excommunications, and so forth. And, of course, financial data, which the Church guards as closely as the US government guards the nuclear codes. Once you clue in to how un-transparent the Church is with news and information that the membership really deserves to know, it is very frustrating.
Social media becomes maybe the only available source for a lot of this “we don’t want to tell you” LDS news. If a stake in Texas shrinks from 8 ward to 5 wards, the last place you’ll hear about it is the Church News or the Deseret News. If you do hear about it, it’s probably on social media, where some member of the stake posts about it and it gets passed on by interested readers, somehow ending up on your feed. It’s the same way “real news” gets circulated in authoritarian countries.
So here’s a real-time experiment I’m going to do. I’m going to take ten minutes and scan these sources to see what sort of news (not self-promoting PR pieces about non-news) I can dig up and post links below.
Deseret News: Elder Soares speaks at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Wash. DC. He endorsed human rights. Rather ironic considering all the groups or categories of humans the Church itself marginalizes or demonizes in its doctrine and practice.
Church News: A piece on Helmuth Hubener, a young LDS teenager executed by the Nazis for putting up anti-Nazi leaflets based on news stories he read on the Internet heard on his shortwave radio. It’s the 100th anniversary of his birthday and the story relates commemorating events in two German cities. This is actually an interesting piece. Read it.
SL Trib: An LDS law prof opines: “I don’t think in good conscience we can call ICE on our co-congregants.” A timely discussion, but it’s behind a paywall and I can’t read the story.
A Facebook search for “LDS Church” produced this piece by Gordon Monson at the SL Trib: “LDS immigration response to Trump needs to sound more like Jesus, less like lawyers.”
So let’s hear from the readers. And not just LDS readers. It would be really interesting to hear from overseas readers. Lately I’ve been watching CBC clips on YouTube (Canadian Broadcasting Corp) to get news on the Canadian response to Trump tariffs. I don’t think Canadians are very happy with Americans at the moment.
- Where do you go to get relatively unbiased online news? Free or paywall?
- Do you get a hardcopy newspaper or news magazine? Just curious.
- Where do you go to get LDS news?
- If you live outside the US, what is your experience getting world news or news about the LDS Church?
Wheat & Tares 
Salt Lake Tribune is excellent imo.
MormonLand podcast is free, and you can also get free access to all articles on LDS religion only. The options are on their site. Or a subscription for lds religion news is only ~3.00 a month. Worth it imo. I also like W&Tares, and Exponent 2 occasionally.
Also Jana Reiss column “Flunking Sainthood” on Religion News Service is excellent!
I second the “Mormonland” podcast. That is an excellent source of getting unbiased, critical LDS news. I’m pretty active on Twitter and a lot of DezNat individuals will howl at anything that Peggy Fletcher Stack writes at the SLTrib, but she is honestly the best writer there and covers everything you need to know about church news. In my view, the reason why some very orthodox individuals don’t like the SLtrib is because they give a critical view into the church and don’t write puff pieces bordering on propaganda. Jana Reiss is excellent too, as is everything at Religious News Service. For religious trends in general, I get Ryan Burge’s Substack (“Graphs About Religion”) delivered to my inbox every day. He wrote a long guest essay in the Deseret News a few months ago about closing his church. It was heart wrenching.
My main news sources are New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribute, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and BBC. I consider myself a centrist, but I have been very impressed with how well the conservative writers at the WSJ are. Once in a while I will click over on Fox News so I can understand the alternate reality that many people are swimming in. I don’t understand how Fox News can be basically propaganda and yet WSJ is actually good journalism even though they are both Rupert Murdoch properties. I speak French and Spanish, so there are some international news sites I like as well (France24, Le Monde, El País, Univision).
I second the “Mormonland” podcast. That is an excellent source of getting unbiased, critical LDS news. I’m pretty active on Twitter and a lot of DezNat individuals will howl at anything that Peggy Fletcher Stack writes at the SLTrib, but she is honestly the best writer there and covers everything you need to know about church news. In my view, the reason why some very orthodox individuals don’t like the SLtrib is because they give a critical view into the church and don’t write puff pieces bordering on propaganda. Jana Reiss is excellent too, as is everything at Religious News Service. For religious trends in general, I get Ryan Burge’s Substack (“Graphs About Religion”) delivered to my inbox every day. He wrote a long guest essay in the Deseret News a few months ago about closing his church. It was heart wrenching.
My main news sources are New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribute, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and BBC. I consider myself a centrist, but I have been very impressed with how well the conservative writers at the WSJ are. Once in a while I will click over on Fox News so I can understand the alternate reality that many people are swimming in. I don’t understand how Fox News can be basically propaganda and yet WSJ is actually good journalism even though they are both Rupert Murdoch properties. I speak French and Spanish, so there are some international news sites I like as well (France24, Le Monde, El País, Univision).
I remember back in 2012 when I was living overseas, and I was seeing with alarm the demise of journalism as news outlets increasingly preferred piece rate articles from global contributors, many of whom were just untrained bloggers from other countries, and this was being published side by side with professional pieces. At the time, I was flying all the time, and I’d pick up a Newsweek at the lounge before boarding my flight. On my international flights, the attendants would bring a trolley through the aisle with a variety of international newspapers, and I’d take the few that were of interest. I always grabbed a WSJ for the financial outlook. Well, even those days are long gone. It’s kind of quaint to me that we are even still talking about CNN, MSNBC, the Post, the Times, etc. The world is truly different.
I get my daily news from podcasts now which tend to be done by journalists and pundits. My favorites are ones that present both sides (Open to Debate, Left Right and Center, Not Even Mad) although I often find myself disagreeing more with the person on the right. It still helps to hear their perspective, and it sometimes is calming, adding some perspective I hadn’t considered, although they are almost never a person who is pro-Trump per se, just conservative in general. Then I will go to Twitter & BlueSky to see what’s trending, what people are talking about. Sometimes I’ll check Reddit to see what the conversation there is, although the current events stuff is less interesting there than the social trends and the discussions about history. I also like some of the international discussions like Ask an American where people want to know if Americans really think such and such.
When it comes to politics on FB, I hate it. I have unfriended several people and blocked many others because I have zero respect for them at this point. They are essentially brownshirts in a fascist movement, swallowing any lie their Lord & Savior DJT feeds them, and it’s doing nobody any favors for me to watch this spectacle. It’s like they’ve never cracked a history book in their lives. My first attempt is always to put a link to the fact check, but if they reply with an anti-liberal screed that every leftist needs to pull their head out and that fact checking is all part of the deep state, well, we’re done. I don’t come out swinging, so I’m not there to pick fights over their gullibility. It’s not like these are people I see on a regular basis anyway. Honestly, I’ve blocked people who posted churchy things I also found needlessly antagonistic or gullible, such as claiming they are being persecuted for having to respect others.
When it comes to church related news, honestly I find I’m not that interested (I know, I know, this is a Mormon-themed blog). I just find it relentlessly disappointing in exactly the same way, over and over. It’s like finding out that your family, who has always said some questionable things but seemed nice enough, were actually donating to the KKK all along. Any efforts church leaders have made to rein in the worst among the membership have been feckless, and I will never get over the fact that Gong and Stevenson attended Trump’s inauguration. This AFTER Nelson & Oaks made Uchtdorf apologize for donating to Biden’s campaign. I’m sure they are all crowing over the rise of the White Christian Nationalists because they will be able to have even more power. The irony is that the ones who are behaving in corrupt ways are claiming everyone else is corrupt and that’s why they have to do it.
Absolutely none of this aligns with my values.
Ad Fontes is a better source than All Sides because All Sides only evaluates bias while Ad Fontes evaluates reliability of the information. For instance Reuters is probably the most unbiased source and highly reliable. CNN leans left strongly and Fox News leans right strongly. However, while CNN is a less factual and reliable than Reuters, Fox news is so unreliable as to meet the criteria of opinion only or propaganda. I get a lot of my news from podcasts from The Bulwark, The Dispatch, The Daily and Tangle. Tangle presents points of view from both the left and the right on a specific topic, and then a Tangle commentator gives their own views on the topic which isn’t necessarily either or centrist. This gives me a chance to think about a variety of views and to consider what others are thinking about things.
I pay the $3 a month to get the SL trib’s religion articles. That’s a useful tool. I also read the Deseret News when a friend posts an opinion piece there, or when I want to compare what is there with what’s in the trib. I also like the Religious News Service
The Salt Lake Tribune’s reporting on the Church is extremely important to the state of Utah (and beyond). The Tribune has come close to going out of business at least a handful of times in the recent past. I shudder to think of how the Church would be emboldened to act even worse than it frequently does without the transparency and accountability that the respected and widely read Tribune provides. Honestly, the Tribune prevents or at least tempers the Church’s worst tendencies that it seems like an elightened Church leadership ought to provide the funding to keep its funding secure for years to come. However, Church leadership isn’t enlightened. Instead, the Church chooses to control the news reported by the Deseret News to be more favorable than it would if it operated independently, and the Church even works, at times, to try to force the Tribune out of business.
The Tribune has made various attempts at changing its business model to adapt to the realities of the internet. It is unfortunate that they currently feel they need to charge for access. That said, I think the modest cost of an online Tribune subscription is well worth it given how much it has forced the Church to behave better over the years. The excellent Tribune journalists have to get paid somehow. If you pay tithing, perhaps you could justify buying a Tribune subscription by deducting the cost from your tithing payment. After all, funding the Tribune will make the world a much better place than just giving the Ensign Peak investors a few more dollars to hoard away in its secretive shell companies.
Let me second the recommendation for MormonLand’s Patreon feed. You get all the SlTrib’s religion coverage (primarily LDS) for very little money. Definitely worthwhile if you follow church news at all.
(Not sure what happened with my earlier comment: “f”? The comment box isn’t working well for me for some reason.)
Early in my career, I had a standing monthly appointment to meet with an executive at the Deseret News to check in and make sure my company was meeting their needs. Back then the Deseret News was an evening newspaper so he preferred that I meet with him after that day’s edition of the newspaper was “approved” and the printing presses could roll. Occasionally, this approval would be delayed past the deadline, in which case I would be asked to wait in the conference room where I couldn’t help but hear much of what was going on. What was going on was that they couldn’t go to print until President Monson (he was a counselor in the FP then) had approved the proposed content of that day’s publication. So, as some of you have already said, if you want a more complete story, read the SL Tribune. I pay about $8.00 per month for an online subscription which I think is a bargain.
I used to read CNN but quit due to the paywall and general hatred of clickbait. SL Trib and Mormon podcasts for breaking Mormon news.
I too peruse Fox News and Deseret News about once a month when I want to see what the other side thinks. Given the world events these days, Deseret News highlights really baffle me. It’s really just a rocky mountain mormon paper. If you really want a deep dive, the comment section will light you up.
Now I subscribe to Sharon McMahon’s The Preamble Newsletter and find it’s a way to keep in touch without getting sucked into the media frenzy. There’s a free version also. I highly recommend her. She’s also on all the platforms.
I don’t Tweet and never did, and I only use facebook for the travel groups. I’m about ready to quit Instagram. I signed up for the cat videos but now it’s just adverts and influencers jamming my feed.
I subscribe to the NYtimes and the Salt Lake Tribune. Aside from that I listen to a variety of YouTube channels and read a variety of sources. News media has actually long struggled with providing consistent, well-researched journalism. Yellow journalism has been around for a long time. But when a piece of investigative journalism emerges, you can tell that it is just that. Almost doesn’t matter the outlet, although some outlets are better structured and more consistent in delivering these pieces of quality journalism. For it is very difficult to put together long narratives based on numerous sources and experts. Some outlets are lies and propaganda, and it is quite obvious that they are. Nonetheless, it is important to listen to the propaganda. It is important to pluck the pieces of truth from the propaganda and acknowledge those as truth and then determine what are the lies and the exaggerations. This is important so as to avoid being blindsided when engaging the conspiracy theorists and propagandists. For if you dismiss everything they say as false, they will fixate on the part of their story they know they can establish as true, make you eat crow, dismiss you as unreasonable, uninformed, and closed-minded, and then claim that the falsehoods of their story are validated. Classic motte-and-bailey tactic.
For news on the church, the SLTribune really is the best right now. The ex-Mormon community used to be very active in finding information from inside sources about the church. Those days, however, are no more. The church has gotten better at preventing leaks and the ex-Mormon community is more fragmented and less coordinated.
Have you tried using the wayback machine to circumvent the paywall on these articles? It usually works for me, just plug in the precise url.
Canadian here. The CBC used to have the highest standards of journalism but that hasn’t been the case for some time. They are heavily subsidized by the government and therefore cannot bite the hand that feeds them. They don’t even allow comments on most of their videos. Expecting objectivity about the government from the CBC is like expecting objectivity on the church from the Deseret News. I say this as a former CBC employee and someone who still works in media, so believe me, this does not give me any pleasure.
To make matters worse just before the 2019 national elections (coincidence?) the government doled out huge subsidies to the other major Canadian broadcasters ostensibly to preserve jobs from online competition. (It didn’t work. These companies still went ahead with huge layoffs and station closures.) But now they are also essentially bought and paid for shills.
My suggestion if you really want to know what is going on in Canada is to go to CTV News or Global News on YouTube, pause the video, and READ THE COMMENTS. That’s where you’ll get the straight goods on what people really think and what is really happening. There are also some independent podcasters who are boots on the ground. The list is too long.
As for news of the church it is hard to keep up from here in Toronto. I’m grateful that the Salt Lake Tribune’s Mormonland is also on YouTube. And I get info here. Thank you Wheat and Tares!
For general news, I use BBC and Guardian websites, and also a local newspaper website, though the BBC local pages are generally better.
For church news I subscribe to the Mormonland podcast, along with a handful of other podcasts, as well as keeping an eye on various blog content, and keep an eye on Reddit. I am strongly considering subscribing to the SLT religion patreon. Just not sure how the subscriptions work from outside the US. I haven’t signed up for patreon with anything else either, as I am not sure how the platform works. I occasionally look at Deseret News, but just find the whole thing hard to stomach.
I have never been a part of Facebook or Twitter/X. That means I also don’t get to see local LDS church content from the various Facebook pages. I was signed up to the ward RS WhatsApp group, but in the end I left that group. It was very bad for my mental health, and was getting me very riled up; so much marinating in misinformation and froth that was unbearable to watch. The last straw was reading a comment by an extremely faithful member, with financial struggles, share a missionary moment, where she had explained she makes her charitable financial contributions to the church humanitarian fund and all the wonderful work the church does, and I was sick to the stomach at the thought of the £5M sat accumulating for years in the UK humanitarian aid account (we get to see it on accounts filed to the charities commission in the UK), barely any of which had been spent before finally being sent over to the US, and knowing that our own ward had been denied funds for a local humanitarian project.
I have also been watching the White House press conferences from the Oval Office. They’re not very long, maybe half an hour. Forbes is covering them live every day on their YouTube channel with no additional commentary. I like getting the info from the horse’s mouth before all the editing and spin happens.
I second Tangle – readtangle.com
Growing up, I was a news and information junkie. I literally read a paper newspaper most days from 8-18 y/o. Even after Scout camp or youth conference, I would catch up with the print when returning back home. I had news withdrawals going on a LDS mission. I would try to scan at the front page walking past the newsstand; but since prohibited and in another language I had no clue what was going on. We only knew what the Mission Pres told us, which was NOTHING. Despite the Berlin wall falling, Kuwait war, and a major cholera outbreak. Growing up we were taught that SL local news should only come from the Deseret news, and never the SL Trib. I questioned my family, why some of the neighbors get the Trib and not the DN. We were told the neighbors wanted their info in the AM, and we wanted our in the PM; and they were not following the Q15 since it was anti-church.
With the internet, my news sources expanded. No longer would I have to read the NY/London times at the library, but in the convenience of my house. I usually will randomly search for an international newspaper just to see what else is going on the the world, to get news we are not provided on CNN/FOX/MSNBC/etc and from another prospective. I even read a Pakistani newspaper, on Sept 9 2001 and commented on it the next day at work, not knowing what was to come. I still to this day will do a web search on random countries and see what they are talking about. Around 2010, I stopped watching all cable news since it was just arguing and no information. To this day I still do random web browsing and youtube/podcast programs to learn about random knowledge and ideas.
In regard to church, I must have never got the memo to avoid certain websites. Originally, I would look at LDS today. They would have links to articles on everything in the news about LDS church, positive or negative. They probably thought any church exposure was good for the institution (This no longer exists). I would look at the posts and learn. Now, I wonder if I did not have a inert passion for reading and learning, if I would still be a active participant. I am amazed how most/all family members have no clue about learning more and doing deep dives into the past and the present LDS news. Today I get my LDS view from both sides of the isle, to form my own viewpoint. However, the LDS official narrative no longer can hold up the the facts. Their only solution is to only read from church sanctioned resources, which leads to ignorance.
Growing up, I was a news and information junkie. I literally read a paper newspaper most days from 8-18 y/o. Even after Scout camp or youth conference, I would catch up with the print when returning back home. I had news withdrawals going on a LDS mission. I would try to scan at the front page walking past the newsstand; but since prohibited and in another language I had no clue what was going on. We only knew what the Mission Pres told us, which was NOTHING. Despite the Berlin wall falling, Kuwait war, and a major cholera outbreak. Growing up we were taught that SL local news should only come from the Deseret news, and never the SL Trib. I questioned my family, why some of the neighbors get the Trib and not the DN. We were told the neighbors wanted their info in the AM, and we wanted our in the PM; and they were not following the Q15 since it was anti-church.
With the internet, my news sources expanded. No longer would I have to read the NY/London times at the library, but in the convenience of my house. I usually will randomly search for an international newspaper just to see what else is going on the the world, to get news we are not provided on CNN/FOX/MSNBC/etc and from another prospective. I even read a Pakistani newspaper, on Sept 9 2001 and commented on it the next day at work, not knowing what was to come. I still to this day will do a web search on random countries and see what they are talking about. Around 2010, I stopped watching all cable news since it was just arguing and no information. To this day I still do random web browsing and youtube/podcast programs to learn about random knowledge and ideas.
In regard to church, I must have never got the memo to avoid certain websites. Originally, I would look at LDS today. They would have links to articles on everything in the news about LDS church, positive or negative. They probably thought any church exposure was good for the institution (This no longer exists). I would look at the posts and learn. Now, I wonder if I did not have a inert passion for reading and learning, if I would still be a active participant. I am amazed how most/all family members have no clue about learning more and doing deep dives into the past and the present LDS news. Today I get my LDS view from both sides of the isle, to form my own viewpoint. However, the LDS official narrative no longer can hold up the the facts. Their only solution is to only read from church sanctioned resources, which leads to ignorance.
Great topic and I agree with the comments. I’ll add that journalism / news / media has changed. I think we all know this. I remember the 1980s when CNN was a fantastic news source. Ok, it was the only 24 hour news channel at the time and the producers took that opportunity seriously. Then “news” became about optimizing profits and segmenting audiences and entertaining the most simple minded.
The best news is found by reading and listening directly to the source of the news. But that takes time and patience. Yet, once the filters get involved, the words said will get skewed and the message manipulated. And there is the problem that what a person says is not necessarily true and can be intentionally wrong.
I now view all media “journalism” as simply the information the reporter / publisher wants people to know. CNN tells us what they and their friends want me to know. Same goes for Fox, and the Washington Post and Bob’s Substack. I will trust that what I read is what the person believes and it is up to me to figure out if that belief is substantive or distorted. By the way, there is value in reading the NY Times and the Post and even the Church News – one learns what those institutions believe and want you to believe, and that is “news”.
Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann coined the phrase “The Gell-Mann effect”. He explained that this explains our own, obvious cognitive dissonance. We will read (or view) a report and know by our own expertise the reporting is wrong – the facts are simply not true. But then we will read (or view) the next report on a topic on which we are unfamiliar and we will treat the reporting as informative. Google AI sums up the Gell-Mann effect with these conclusions:
And there you have it. People value the presence of information far more than the value the accuracy of that information. And this is why we have so many “news” channels and a near infinite supply of web pages.
I Believe it is a worthy endeavor to support journalism by subscribing to the newspaper’s internet outlets. Fortunately these days the $$ goes to the Journalism part, and not to the cost of printing and delivering a physical newspaper (God Bless the Internet !). I subscribe to The [London] Times, the NY Times, and the SL Tribune. I previously subscribed to the Boston Globe, but bailed on that when I realized it is impossible to cancel one’s subscription [literally impossible – you have to cancel via telephone, using a telephone line that is never unbusy. I finally had to cancel the credit card that was in their file for billing]. I also subscribed to the Washington Post, which I feel is a fine source, but decided to cancel last fall when I learned that Jeff Bezos wouldn’t allow his editor to endorse the non-Trump candidate.
As far as LDS [non-pablum] news, there are two good YouTube sources: ‘Nemo the Mormon’ tries to present LDS-based news items in as factual a manner as can be determined; ‘Generally Unquotable’ also scours the news world for LDS-related stories, and presents them factually [although she also interjects her personal experiences or feelings when applicable]. Of course the SL Tribune is the gold standard for unbiased reporting of the Church; Peggy Fletcher Stack is the best at being unbiased in either direction.
Thanks Dave B & all you commenters! Many sources I had not known about. I archived this post for later reference.
One I didn’t see mentioned is ProPublica. A ProPublica investigation broke the information about the lavish gifts SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas regularly accepts. And has accepted for decades.
They also team up with various local newspapers across the US for investigative pieces.
P.S. thanks Brad D, for informing me about a logic fallacy I didn’t know about before. It led me down a useful rabbit hole.
A Disciple, “The best news is found by reading and listening directly to the source of the news. But that takes time and patience. Yet, once the filters get involved, the words said will get skewed and the message manipulated. And there is the problem that what a person says is not necessarily true and can be intentionally wrong.”
I’d like to speak to this. I often hear people who are so mistrusting of “the media” and of second-hand sources, but still hungry for information, explanations, and answers, that they like to think that the only real way to get answers is to seek out primary sources and get to the heart of the news. On the face of it, it seems admirable. I do this too. I read news about a report and a synopsis and summary of the report. I then seek out the report itself and look at it. I hear report of someone saying something. I go and seek out the actual person saying the thing they were alleged to have said. When doing academic research, I like to try to find and read the sources that a book is referencing. That, of course, isn’t always possible. Some investigative journalist pieces rely on inside sources that we cannot access. Sometimes we can access information, but would need a better technical understanding in order to digest it, and need to rely on experts or even expert journalists to be able to break down the information into understandable bits.
The problem is that to find out about information and to develop a framework through which to interpret information, you have to rely on second-hand sources and you have to find a group of people or experts or journalists that you trust to deliver good information. Sometimes expert or journalistic opinion is so well-argued and built on such seemingly solid logic and an array of sources that it simply trumps any explanation you could concoct on your own using the same sources. And you know that it is solid. So I reject the premise that we shouldn’t trust the big bad “media.” For if you can’t bring yourself to trust anyone simply because they work in media or as a journalist or as an expert in some field, you have to ask yourself this question: why should anyone trust you and your explanations? Perhaps you say, “oh, see for yourself.” See what for myself? Don’t you make arguments and explanations around information that you see? Don’t you try to convince others that what you are showing is evidence for a larger explanation? How does that make you different from a journalist, researcher, or expert?
Lastly, I have many conspiracy theorists in the family with whom I have engaged many topics at length. One thing they often do that really annoys me is claim to be arriving at an opinion or idea simply because they saw the primary source, or consulted a primary source and spotted an anomaly. What they are not telling me, but is nonetheless painfully obvious, is that they arrived at their opinion by consulting, you guessed it, a second-hand media source (conspiracy theory website or YouTube channel) that confirmed their preexisting biases! But they won’t own up to how they arrived at said piece of evidence or supposed anomaly. They also typically won’t own up to the fact that they are putting forth an argument. They like to say, “oh, I’m just relaying the facts.” No. You’re selecting evidence and how to interpret it. Everything goes through a filter in one form or another. Some filters are simply cleaner and more reliable than others. Conspiracy theory websites and YouTubers are the least reliable people out there, many of them straight up liars and fabricators.
Along a similar line, what are good fact checking sites?
I don’t spend much time viewing news reportage. I’m not necessarily proud of that, but I’m also ambivalent about the utter necessity of all of us staying completely up to date on all issues at all times (or, at least, the idea that doing so outweighs other concerns, such as social cohesion and mental wellbeing). I’ll admit to being a few steps behind—I usually wait until there’s a Wikipedia article covering a news event before I dive in.
Analysis is a different story. I try to read from a variety of sources on that media bias chart shared above (The New Yorker, NYT, Atlantic, Reason, Economist, etc.).
I signed up to get multiple daily emails from the Associated Press that just list the facts, no commentary. I will also scan Yahoo news, but look closely at the source – I can usually guess just by the headline though. I will trust something by Reuters.
For church news, I’d like to subscribe to the Tribune, but I already have a Washington Post and Baltimore Sun (Maryland here!) subscriptions and I’m just not that invested in church drama these days, though I’m still considering it. The points made regarding the checks and balances of the Tribune are worth supporting.
Slightly OT. My science-denying family frequently state that they did their own research when arriving at their opinion. None of them is a scientist, epidemiologist, or chemist. What they mean by research is not reading the scientific paper but rather reading the opinions written by people with whom they agree, who are frequently NOT scientist, epidemiologist, or chemists.. I can always stop their yammering by asking a question such as “what would be the affect on this vaccine if one were to increase the amount of iron in the bloodstream?” A prime example of this ignorance silo is RFK, Jr.
On doing your own research. I used to teach college classes. What I found is that learning any and all subjects is hard work. Preparing for a test is difficult. You can’t just gloss over this or that aspect of the topic. You have to review, review, review. To learn the initial parts of any subject requires using a textbook that has been written by several experts and peer reviewed by teams is other experts. Experts matter. To become an expert is extremely difficult. You have to test your ideas over and over before peers who can often try to challenge and question your ideas. The conspiracy/do-your-own-research crowd thinks they can just bypass all that. Their research methodology is essentially relying on fringe figures, many of whom all pathological liars or propaganda spreaders employed by foreign governments. None of these folks have standing in the larger expert community. It is truly sad that such bad logic is spreading so quickly.