I have recently talked to a Chinese friend of mine who started talking about how smart Trump is etc. She previously only gained her knowledge through the Chinese media and not the “western propaganda”, so it was her first exposure to the non-CCP-controlled stuff. I told her “you sound like you read FOX news”. She replied with “hahah yes, how did you know?”
This made me realize that she is very prone to getting manipulated and not doing any fact-checking. However, this situation made me reflect on my own news-sourcing skills.
How do you deal with the issue and what can I do step-by-step to verify the news that I read myself and at the same time a way that I can recommend to my Chinese friend so that she doesn’t fall for the most obvious tricks so easily?
Sources like Ground News help to show where the bias of your sources lay. Mind you, even neutral sources have their issues since they may not cover more serious “partisan” topics, even if the material is very disturbing.
Ground News does have a Blind Spot tool as well to help show most stories that the other side is not talking about, excluding the very serious ones I mentioned.
This is splitting hairs a bit, but Ground News is more of an aggregator with useful framing than a source in and of itself.
You’re right about it being more of an aggregator. I think having a good aggregator is about as important as the sources. To be more informed, hearing the news from different perspectives is essential, I feel.
For actual sources, starting internationally is a good bet to get an outside perspective of what’s going on in your country. I feel that the BBC does a great job of covering US news for that reason. Al-Jazeera is another international source that is decent for most news in the US, but has notable biases for issues in the Middle East as far as I am aware.
For more domestic US sources, PBS and NPR are the gold standards and worth supporting since they are public broadcasting networks. The other major news networks have more notable biases since they are privately owned.
For business news, Axios, Forbes, and Yahoo Finance do a decent job.
Do they still call CNN leftist?
They label it as “leans left” now, with independent reviewers, so not as left as other sources. Although, I question if that takes into account the topics that don’t make it on the website.
To be fair, CNN “leans left” in the same way US Democrat liberals “lean left”. Which is to say, socially progressive (usually) and economically capitalist.
Assuming I’m using those terms right, which I think I am, at least in the context of the US.
I would say CNN probably still is mostly left leaning (relatively), but they have had a lot more right wing stances over the past five years than they did the previous decades.
I believe you used those terms correctly, although offline people would tend to say it more as economically conservative for that second part, in the US.
I really like ground news. I have the cheap plan, like $10/yr. Worth it.