Finding Reliable Journalism

By the Blog Author

It’s getting harder and harder to find fair-minded, fact-based journalism even in the Anglosphere.  I’d like to share a few useful tricks that I use.

First of all, I don’t assume that one political philosophy has a monopoly on realism or accurate policy guidance.  Therefore I tend to follow both the center-left news summary of Teagan Goddard’s political wire as well as the center-right approach of RealClearPolitics.  This is the right path.  Both the left and the right are most trustworthy when they are criticizing themselves.

I have a lot of time on my hands these days, yet I don’t have any time to waste on modern television “news.”  It’s just awful.  It’s been going downhill –fast!—ever since the late John Chancellor was replaced by Connie Chung at NBC many years ago.  The news anchors these days are closely related, behaviorally and in personal philosophy, to flight attendants or to game show hosts.  They are paid precisely in accordance with how personable they appear to polled audiences and focus groups.  Therefore those who survive and thrive are at once vapid yet likeable.  Speed reading the headlines on the internet is a much more productive use of time than vegetating in front of a screen and being spoon-fed human interest blather of limited value.

A frustrating and worrisome problem that I’m having stems from the loss of Scientific American as the world standard of good writing about science.  Their modern biases and painfully trippy attempts to present misinformation as “relevant” have severely compromised this publication, and there isn’t a good replacement for it.  Science journalism can really run away with a silly fad these days, from “global warming” to the non-existent reappearance of the ivory-billed woodpecker.  What I do is cherry pick RealClearScience for articles with strong and factual implied narration and look especially for emerging technologies.

Fortunately, for business and banking issues, there is a gold standard in worldwide reporting – the Financial Times of London.  They were way ahead of everyone else on the crash of 2008, and they remain the most lucid and useful analysis of financial matters seven years later.

I am looking for and still have not found alternative media or blogs that are reliable enough to consistently sample.  Some of them are right some of the time, but this is not an environment where high quality can be found at this date.

Let me close by referring you to an article from Maclean’s in Canada that is spot-on as great and trustworthy print journalism.  RealClearPolitics is typically at its best when it references and links to an article from London, Ottawa, Toronto, Sydney or Melbourne, especially if the article is about geopolitics or America.  RCP was my source for the link below.  American journalists have lost the ability to analyze their own territory with unbiased insight and trustworthy internal narration.  The best of our Canadian neighbors still know how to spot and important political story and cover the facts.

http://www.macleans.ca/politics/angela-merkel-the-real-leader-of-the-free-world/