collinsmark said:
I want to subscribe to a reputable news source (even if I have to pay). I want a news source that has not abandoned journalistic integrity . . .I live in the USA at the moment, by the way. So far I'm considering:
- Giving NPR a bigger donation
- Subscribing to Washington Post
- Subscribing to New York Times
Does anybody have other suggestions?
@collinsmark - returning to your original query, here are my thoughts on your first three candidates, plus some suggestions for how to vet candidates:
Both the NYT and NPR are considered "liberal" news outfits, for reasons I'll get to shortly. By contrast Washington Post is
not considered a liberal paper, but a relatively conservative paper:
see Wikipedia for more. They've gone after Trump in part because 1) reporters love to scramble for scoops, and there were lots of scoops on the Trump beat (and will be for as long as we still have a free press), and 2) Trump attacked dyed-in-the-wool conservatives almost as much as he attacked liberals, & so conservative papers attacked back.
Now, what's a "liberal" paper vs. "conservative"? If you took blood samples for NPR reporters and WSJ reporters, you'd probably find that they were all tinged blue. That's because the majority of journalists do skew to liberal values - see for example
this story in the Atlantic and the
Indiana U. study it is based on. But if the reporters & editors at both outlets are similarly liberal, how can NPR be liberal but WSJ conservative? There are three answers here; and it's these three answers that can help you vet journalistic organizations in general: 1) the slant of their news coverage; 2) the slant of the editorial board & editorial pages; and 3) the slant of who owns them. Note that with only occasional exceptions, I am talking primarily about sources for what is called "hard news" or "breaking news," not sources of opinion on same. Also I'll stay away from TV news sources other than PBS, because I don't know much about national TV from the inside.
News coverage: The WSJ is conservative in the old Republican sense: it focuses primarily on business and investing, from the point of view of "what's good for business and investing is good for America." In covering politics, it will in a similar spirit focus on policy issues of concern to business. By contrast, liberal outlets such as NPR and the NYT cover many issues of interest only to persons with liberal values: "social justice," the environment, human rights, civil rights and race, etc. However NPR and the NYT also have massive business coverage, nearly as much as the WSJ; this is largely because business execs, office employees, and investors are among the most devoted subscribers to mainstream news sources. The only difference is that a paper such as the NYT has broader & more critical coverage of ethics in business and investing than does the WSJ; yet the WSJ doesn't totally eschew ethics coverage either. So liberal and conservative tend to converge when it comes to business, but diverge when it comes to coverage of liberal issues such as environment etc. In other words it's not that liberal news outfits slant their coverage of liberal issues; it's that they cover them at all.
Editorial pages: One thing that ordinary readers typically don't realize is that a paper's news coverage originates from persons who comprise what is called the "news room", while editorials & op eds originate from persons who comprise what is called "the editorial board." Two totally separate groups of people - they inhabit separate physical spaces & there is very much a firewall between them. Obviously the editorials & op-eds of the WSJ are slanted heavily towards very conservative values; but this does not mean that the WSJ's news stories betray an equal slant. For example you might see
fewer stories about Trump's habitual lying in the WSJ, but what stories do appear will hew pretty closely to how such stories would be reported in the NYT. That's because reporters and news editors originate those stories - not the editorial board. (Note that I am excluding non-traditional online outfits such as the Huffington Post, where I suspect these two areas of responsibility mingle in a big way. You could not possibly call the HuffPo mainstream, but I suspect their more naive readers think of it that way. Personally I suspect HuffPo of excess liberal bias, making them unreliable as a primary news source.)
Ownership: Ownership gets to pick the editorial board & so has a big influence on editorials & op-eds; and ownership also controls the broad outlines of news coverage. For example, the Washington Post used to be very liberal under Phil Graham and his daughter Katherine; but after Katherine's death, the paper slowly became somewhat more conservative under the Graham family, a trend which seems to have continued under current owner Jeff Bezos (again,
see Wikipedia). Meanwhile the NYT is publicly owned, but privately controlled: see
Wikipedia for more. However the big thing to remember about even family ownership is that newspapers are first of all a business; and typically not very profitable compared to other industries. What do businesses want most of all? Stability, which means preservation of the status quo; and a tax and economic system that is reasonably favorable to them. Hence the real bias that I suspect may sneak even into what sorts of news coverage is encouraged or discouraged is a bias in favor of preserving the current environment of highly regulated capitalism in a pro-corporate environment, with a political system controlled by two major political parties who have the ability to shut out other nascent parties. You may have noticed that pretty much all newspapers & TV stations seem to consider that the only legitimate political parties are the Democrats & Republicans. This is not an accident; it is a favoring of the seemingly "safe" status quo. And it goes both ways, i.e. back when I was a reporter, government agencies & political parties alike would demand to see an official press badge before granting you access to an event. I've been out of the business a long time, but I suspect this is still the case today.
Some other suggestions:
- What is considered news naturally varies somewhat by country, as do journalistic conventions to some degree. E.g. the U.S. and the U.K. differ somewhat, though not hugely; the U.K. and some countries in Europe differ hugely; Europe most likely differs from the Middle East; and so on. So one thing I would suggest is that you maintain not just the integrity of your news sources, but their diversity as well: The NYT, although excellent, may for example fail to cover important stories in certain countries, for whatever reason (possibly because these are uncomfortable for a paper in favor of the status quo in the U.S.); so also include the BBC and perhaps a news outlet or two based in the Middle East, Europe, etc.
- One constant globally is the question of how free a press is and specifically how free reporters are to report what actually happens, without government interference or fear for their lives; there are organizations which track, this, e.g. Reporters Without Borders and a number of others. If you really care about the role of a free press in sustaining democracy, maybe you could identify one of these organizations to check in with once in a while, e.g. each year when they issue their annual report. Reporters Without Borders surveys relative press freedom in different countries, for example: https://rsf.org/en/ranking'
- Also related to diversity: liberal news outlets are more willing to print at least some stories & op-eds that are openly critical of the U.S. (see for example this op-ed in the NYT on the CIA's role in destabilizing Chile in the 1970s, now relevant since Russia is trying to destabilize the U.S.). So if you don't have time to subscribe to a non-U.S. news source, but do value diversity when it comes to international coverage, you'd be far better off with a liberal outlet such as NPR or NYT than a conservative outlet such as Washington Post or WSJ.
- Meanwhile, for domestic diversity, you might think of including at least one or two conservative outlets. Here I'd suggest subscribing to a respected conservative news/opinion magazine (e.g. a "weekly") rather than a daily paper as such, e.g. The National Review Online. Other good choices can be found in this survey article: Top 10 Conservative Magazines.
- Another way to vet a news source is to ask, how much actual reporting do they generate? A big knock against the Huffington Post is, they rarely if ever break hard news stories; instead they repeat stories from those who broke them & embroider these repetitions with excess liberal sentiment. Given that by pretending to be a news source, rather than an opinion source, they are stealing readers from a relative handful of financially stressed companies (NYT for example) that nonetheless still pay their workers good money for live reporting, this to me is another mark against HuffPo. It takes a lot of money to pay for reporters who have even minimal training, and editors who can force reporters to follow the conventions & fact check and so forth. What HuffPo's official editorial standards are, I haven't checked up on; but they don't seem very high compared to WSJ, NYT, BBC, etc.
- Also if you have time read up on journalistic conventions. For books, I highly recommend Bennett's "https://www.amazon.com/dp/0205082416/?tag=pfamazon01-20," 9th Ed., for a sobering analysis of the news industry's dependence on "official sources"; or for an admittedly biased but still interesting indictment of corporate ownership, you could look at Herman & Chomsky's "https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375714499/?tag=pfamazon01-20." For shorter pieces, Russell Baker's funny but sad reminiscent essay "Spring Before Swine" gives you the feel of how terribly these conventions come to grind on reporters who know better. And Wikipedia will give you a small start on one journalist convention - "objectivity," which is as flawed a concept as "justice" but still represents a major advance over mere partisanship : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalistic_objectivity
The sad thing is I've met several [real] people like that in the last several months.
