The Gaming Den

I find the BBC to be pretty good (when not dealing with issues of "England vs Russia, who is right and who is wrong?"* or "Is Britain great?"**), and it's interesting when they give their view on things happening inside Britain (such as the "Who has the right to silence the BNP? We hate them as much as everyone else, but we won't use that as a reason not to interview the racist twats. If a politician wishes to ban it so as to reduce race riots, by all means feel free.")

I don't actually watch Australian news, unless you want to include Good News Week (which is a comedy show that draws upon the current news rather than being a source unto themselves). But you usually hear about ABC being pretty decent.

*A bad example, given Russia basically was in the wrong - defending assassins who had performed an extrajudicial slaying on foreign soil, flying bombers around British airspace etc. Although some believe this was, right from the start, a big plan by Russia and the UK to make it look like war was imminent just to scare America. It would be nice to think that was the case.

**Interestingly enough, most British celebrities/comedians give a resounding "NO!" to this, and will gladly tell you their country is awful.

Koumei wrote:
**Interestingly enough, most British celebrities/comedians give a resounding "NO!" to this, and will gladly tell you their country is awful.

Isn't it de rigeur for celebrities/comedians to hate their country of origin?

Game On,
fbmf

It is, but in America people will lynch you if you don't shout from on high that you love the US.

sabs wrote:It is, but in America people will lynch you if you don't shout from on high that you love the US.

I used to be a bouncer in a comedy club. I can attest that comics pile on the US hate with reckless abandon.

Game On,
fbmf

If I am interested in just the basics of a story - the Ws and how - I don't care that much about source. I try to avoid blogs (even HuffPo), and get the gist of the story mostly from Google News snippets.

If it's a story I'm interested in, I'll usually read multiple articles from various sources just to get a wide range of perspectives. If I have a contact who's closer to the topic, I'll ask them for their take.

To find an unreputable news source, look for advertisements. It is either unreputable or on the way there.

Okay, that's neither entirely true or fair, but there is a point here - the U.S. news organizations are profitable businesses whose income is a function of the number of people who watch them. And it turns out the best way to maximize your customer base is to gradually get more and more extreme (and cover more and more sensationalist shit, like the vaginas of famous celebrities, and how it turns out liberals/conservatives are destroying America) because those things draw people in.

Extreme conservative news (ahem, News Corp) has gotten very good at this. They have a customer base that trusts nothing but extreme conservative news, because nothing else comes close to sharing its position. There is no overlap. They have an exclusive customer base. Which means it is absolutely impossible to reach over with a left-wing argument, fact, or theory, no matter how good it is, because there is absolutely nothing from the left-wing they consider reputable, because the two aren't even agreeing on the same facts.

(I'm showing my own bias here, because you can make the same argument in reverse - I'm just hoping we can all agree News Corp is a bunch of a BS by example, even if we disagree about everything else...)

I get most of my news from Lenin's Tomb (British SWP blogger) and Immanuel Wallerstein (post-marxist sociologist). The BBC and NYT are IMHO very right-wing, but I accept their versions of the facts unless they're talking about, e.g., Haiti, Hugo Chavez, or street demonstrations; I also can't read their "lifestyle" coverage because it makes me too angry or sad, depending on my mood. For example, the NYT recently had an article on "energy efficiency in your second home".

I don't read Counterpunch (except once in a very long while) or the Huffington Post, also for reasons of tone. They're too whiny, or they're just "petitioning the big Other", or something. I do think Mother Jones is very good, I should probably read it more often.

From my perspective "left" and "right" don't map very well onto the actual antagonisms in the world, which are mainly economic. There was a roundtable on radical publishing at the ICA in London a few months ago and Peter Hallward, who for some reason is trying to resurrect the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", made the point that we currently live in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. No one in the first world is talking about reorganizing systems of production, or even about surplus value as a product of society which society must decide what to do with (google books). Whatever ideological antagonisms the left and right in the first world fight over--science, religion, social freedoms, anything--they represent the same economic class, and in their media any challenge to it is alternately mocked, ignored, or demonized.

Mother Jones is quite good. I don't read the site regularly, but I've been directed to some really, really great articles.