News Media

I've sent you a private message with some suggestions. I am reluctant to share my political views in this forum as I might share technical interests with some yet live on disparate ends of the political spectrum. Best to keep things somewhat separate where possible. I would rather focus on free software (and the eventual off-topic discussion)

Publicly I will say that staying informed in a wide sense of the word can quickly become a full-time pursuit which I would advise against. Further, the news media is full of dirty practices. Perhaps it is wiser to stick to some narrow subjects than to try to get an overall picture of what's happening in the world. Dunno. Tough call. I do think that an informed multitude is essential. Difficult to say how exactly we should stay informed in an age of overinformation and dissinformation. I would say -- if you want to keep on the side of the disenfranchised -- listen to those who are most persecuted by the powerful, but even then, be skeptical and remember we all have personal interests, power corrupts, et cetera.

I fully agree with what Fbit wrote in their reply, especially the bit about being properly informed about *everything* being a fulltime job, and seldom worth your time. But I hope you don't mind if I add my 2 cents.

Firstly, as a general rule-of-thumb, the further news is published from where you live, the more it's contents are likely to be subject to propaganda (and the less likely they are to be directly useful to you). A neighbourhood newsletter produced by people in that neighbourhood will tend to be pretty reliable, because they are writing about things they have direct knowledge of. Traditional news conglomerates, whose audience is the population of a whole country or everyone in the world in a language group (eg all English speakers), are only as reliable as their sources. Also, they are a high priority target for propagandists of all kinds.

Secondly, as FBit says, when deciding how seriously to take the contents of an article, it's worth considering the motives of the writer and the publisher. In Aotearoa (NZ) where I come from, many of the so-called "community newspapers" are actually owned by the same company that owns and operates many of the daily newspapers in the major cities (Fairfax). The articles in these "local" newspapers are often slanted towards the interests of the corporations that advertise in the major dailies, and I treat them with much more scepticism than I would articles in a genuinely community-run newspaper.

With print publications and broadcast media, finding out who actually owns and operates them can require a bit of research. On the internet, finding the publisher of an article is often as easy as stripping the URL back to the domain name (eg stripping the URL of this page back to "trisquel.info"), and sometimes removing any subdomains (eg stripping layers.openembedded.org back to openembedded.org). Usually, an "about" page will give you some information about the publisher, and looking them up on sites like SourceWatch.org and PowerBase.info can reveal information they don't want you to know about their ownership and funding. More online research aids can be found here:
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/drillingfortruth/online-research-aids

Hope some of that is useful.