Real News

[Dragline]

I am interested in identifying sources that do not just present raw narratives like most, but present robust data to back up whatever they are saying, and not cherry-picked crap. Note, this excludes all of MSM and the most popular alternatives. I have only identified a couple so far.

One is www.fivethirtyeight.com -- Nate Silver's site. This is about as authentic as it gets these days, because his whole premise is to provide confidence intervals about the probability of being accurate, and to aggregate as much data as possible.

The other, which is always most interesting (and so god-damn Gen-X in presentation), is L2 on YouTube. See this for the latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTqfGxEajks

Let me know if you find others, but basically money (intention with numbers) talks and bullshit (politics and drama without numbers or a couple cherry-picked numbers) walks. I want stuff you would bet a lot of money on.

For instance, in my world the news starts at 2:20 of the L2 video. Because this guy never says anything positive if it isn't.

[BRUTE]

brute would like to suggest the opposite angle: sure, all reality is numbers, but all human thoughts are narrative. brute finds numbers mostly distract from the truth, because they're poorly picked, made up, irrelevant, or worse.

as an example, consider the somewhat recent invasion of eastern ukraine by russia. what might numbers tell Dragline? that putin placed 200,000 soldiers there? that it took 23.5 days? that russia's military spending is 7.8x that of ukraine?

what brute finds more interesting is the narrative of this piece of news. why did putin invade ukraine? he himself of course portraits the invasion as a "bringing home the ethnic russians" there. nato countries portrait putin as a power-hungry savage, basically the next hitler. brute recently heard the interesting idea that putin might have invaded ukraine solely to weaken the petro-dollar. with the US putting sanctions on trading with russia, and europe completely dependent on russian oil and gas imports, putin lured the US into forcing their partners (europe) to abandon the US dollar for their energy trade, and instead trade in rubels, euros, or what have you. while this is of course hard to prove (brute cannot read putin's mind), it is an interesting narrative.

[GandK]

Items in my feedly list that meet your criteria: Gallup, Pew, and Think Quarterly by Google. All of them are actually doing the research. (sorry no links, I'm on my phone at present)

Also check out Saying the Unsaid in New York by Larry Littlefield. He does draw conclusions in his posts, but he's a serious data nerd first and foremost.

Honorable mention to the IQ2 debates (YouTube). It's 100% opinions, but since you're guaranteed to get both sides, I'm okay with that.

My preferred news source for US national news is the BBC.

[IlliniDave]

I'm pretty content with the news I get from NPR on my commute. It includes a BBC news show if I listen a little later in the evening. Typically I don't. Financial news I get after it bubbles up to the discussions on bogleheads.org. Gloom and doom I get here . But I'm not a big consumer of news, which is product of largely focusing on my own little palette of things I can control.

[jacob]

http://www.reuters.com/tools/rss
http://ransquawk.com/ (5 minute delay on the free version. You'll still know things about 2-3 hours before they show up in newspapers)

[stayhigh]

http://www.zerohedge.com/

[jennypenny]

The biggest gripe I have is content, not slant. I don't mind sifting through several sites to get what I need, but I hate having to wade through non-news. Even Silver's site is full of what I consider non-news. This week, they had almost as many articles about the Oscars as they did about the primaries. That drives me crazy. It makes me wonder how many people could name all of the Best Picture nominees but not the remaining presidential candidates.

[Riggerjack]

@jennypenny:
Are you implying that presidential candidates are somehow more relevant than Oscar nominees?

;-D

[theanimal]

Well, I thought I'd put Dragline's claim to the test. I have friends who were betting on the oscars and so when I checked out fivethrityeight their top article was oscar predictions. Being not interested in watching these sort of things and having seen none of the movies, I wasn't going to participate. Yet, fivethirtyeight had those predictions and I saw Dragline's post so I bet on the oscars using the picks from fivethirtyeight. I ended up tying for first. So at the least, fivethirtyeight's Oscar news is of high quality

[Miss Lonelyhearts]

I believe it's a mistake to dismiss the entire mainstream media out of hand. The strength of organizations like the New York Times is that they employ several hundred people whose ostensible jobs are news gathering; even if only 5% are worth following, that's several articles a day. Read bylines and remember a writer's track record, and adjust future expectations accordingly. This is what L2 seems to be doing: they cite The New York Times, Adweek, Bloomberg, and The Guardian.

[JamesR]

Constantly having to read between the lines is exhausting.

[JamesR]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/wha ... ment-rate/

On the one hand, it’s good news that even as student debt has skyrocketed, young people have managed to avoid falling deeper into debt overall. That suggests millennials’ finances may be more stable than they are often portrayed. But debt isn’t always a bad thing. Falling credit card balances are a positive trend, but the decline in mortgages and auto loans indicates that — whether because of student debt, limited job prospects, tighter lending standards or other factors — many young people are still struggling to get a financial foothold in adulthood.

Equating adulthood with cars and houses, ouch. That last sentence was superfluous.

[Dragline]

I believe it's a mistake to dismiss the entire mainstream media out of hand. The strength of organizations like the New York Times is that they employ several hundred people whose ostensible jobs are news gathering; even if only 5% are worth following, that's several articles a day. Read bylines and remember a writer's track record, and adjust future expectations accordingly. This is what L2 seems to be doing: they cite The New York Times, Adweek, Bloomberg, and The Guardian.

I do follow these on Twitter to get the headlines. They are good about telling you what happened just yesterday. They are usually bad about what it means, because they generally attach too much importance to unusual events and behaviors, as well as too much importance to what happened just yesterday.

They also seem to follow this "index journalism" model to a large extent that jacob mentioned over here, merely repeating what other journalists have said (or worse, the raw contents of canned press releases and press conferences): viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7302&start=75

[almostthere]

Funny I have been on the same mission lately.

+1 for reuters
I also like bloomberg gadfly. It is market opinion / trends backed up by pretty good data infographics. Much better than normal bloomberg which I find very difficult to navigate. The only way I find anything good there is someone else's link to it.

[jennypenny]

What's up with CNN? Apparently, they ran old footage of the Minsk subway bombing yesterday claiming it was from Brussels. Twitter lit up immediately when people recognized the station and/or knew it wasn't Brussels, yet CNN never issued a retraction or took it down. It's still up.

I don't get it. Why would they bother? There was plenty of real footage yesterday that they could have shown. Where is the watchdog group that CNN was forced to create after one of the (too many) times they were caught faking news coverage? What's sad is that they all must cheat because none of the major networks seem willing to call out the others when it happens.

I don't like that TV news is held to a different standard than print media.

[Dragline]

This is outstanding: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/v ... molehills/

Proving that we are all dead of ebola according to the media. Aren't we?

[jacob]

@Dragline - Nice find! However, where's the graph for terrorists, sharks, bathtub drownings, and ladder falls? ... Also very interesting but hard to count would be major killers like heart disease, cancer, COPD, urban pollution, ... and car crashes.---Deaths and disasters that aren't news at all.

[Dragline]

For that you have to look at things like this: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicd ... ly-chart-7

and this: http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowled ... chart.aspx

Terrorism is way down on the list (see http://www.livescience.com/3780-odds-dying.html), unless you live in Nigeria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan or Syrian, which accounted for 78% of the 32,700 worldwide deaths from it in 2014, meaning that there were 7,194 in the entire world of outside those countries. Note that 19% of those deaths were of the perpetrators themselves.

In the US you are more likely to get crushed by furniture than get killed by a terrorist: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mon ... terrorist/

[jacob]

I know the numbers. I'm looking for the missing reporting reflecting that. Where are all the reports about the people who got crushed as their TVs fell on them or the 70000+ people who died from diabetes last year?

[Dragline]

I can't help you there. But I am wondering if we shouldn't have a blanket immigration ban on cabinet makers and cordon off the Ethan Allen and Ikea stores. Just to be safe until we figure out how all these people are getting crushed.