Good point.
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I’d add the Guardian to that list. For general broadcast news Auntie Beeb is also good, and I find the CBC useful as well since they cover a lot of American stories. Along with the other good sources you mention, they all have their biases, but they’re reputable and try to be nuanced and take views in opposition to their own into account so their audiences aren’t completely relegated to bubbles.
For world news, I suggest opening RT on one monitor, and CNN on the other, and then sort of crossing your eyes like you are doing a magic eye picture. Even doing that, what you are seeing in that composite is still largely… convenient untruths. It’s propaganda all the way down.
Honestly, these days, when I want news out of some region I just hope I’ve friends there.
Mostly agree with @Gracchus list, (the BBC has been in a downward spiral for some years now).
I’d include alJazeera as well.
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Some editors here are far more guilty of headline hyperbole (AKA click bait) than others.
Having just revisited some Sokal writing, I want to hug you for this!
Been reading them for >20 years, warts and all. I even came to love some of their in house biases in a way. Their now former long time Jerusalem corespondent was a British-Israeli un-reformed leftist who injected so much opinion into his writing that it just became hilariously wrong at times. I took great pleasure in writing letters to the editor on this.
As much as I disagreed with him, I was genuinely sad to read of his passing. I felt like I’d really lost an argument budy.
Because of their biases I dont trust either of those two to report even the weather in Tel Aviv or Tokyo.
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It’s not just what you should and shouldn’t trust when you read something. It’s what you don’t read, because it’s not published. Even publishing completely true accounts, but being very picky about which news to publish, can lead to bias. That’s why you’ve got to read opposite (in any sense of that word) sources - because they will sometimes report on different things completely.
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Well, if you’re in the mood to chase that rabbit further, check out Helen Longino’s Science as Social Knowledge.
Sokal demonstrates why the SSK Strong Programme is daft; Longino provides the solution to the problems that initially provoked the postmodern turn in the Sociology of Science [1].
[1] TLDR version: “yes, individual scientists are imperfect and biased humans, and the broader scientific enterprise is influenced by cultural factors, but in the long term, collectively, science does result in an increasingly close approximation of objective truth, by mechanisms that fundamentally depend upon those same irrational biases and social influences”.
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Oh the Social Alchemies are always good for a laugh. And then a flood of tears when I realize some people take that stuff seriously.
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Longino is a hardcore rationalist philosopher of science; Science as Social Knowledge is a comprehensive demolition of SSK Strong Programme nonsense (Barnes & Bloor, Latour, etc), as well as a landmark book on the Demarcation Problem.
Not as entertaining a read as Sokal, though; less jokes, more philosophy.
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My father may be familiar there but I’m not. I have limits on giving time to certain subjects.
Does anybody know what the answer to this problem is? I don’t think I was in class that day.
I suspect that most scoring has as much to do with the true variance of a new venue’s viewpoints as it does how well said venue overlaps with the reader’s viewpoints. Many here complained that Jill Stein, for instance, didn’t get a lot of positive coverage, and would have liked to see more, far beyond her realized share of the popular vote. Echo chamber effect? Extremely hard to say until someone produces some pretty figures on Boingboing, which no-one has done (yet) 
I’m aware of their biases, especially against Israel. I’d still take them over the outlets that deliberately confuse “weather” with “climate” and also confuse “the state of Israel” with “Likud.”
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I believe that the USA was better served when we had competing newspapers in every city who unashamedly displayed their loyalties right up front, as compared to today’s “objective” news sources which self-censor by omission.
I generally start in my own semi-permeable bubble (reason.com and antiwar.com) but I always make a point of checking sites across the spectrum from Daily Kos and Salon to American Interest and PJ Media.
Do I spend a lot of time on the “good, gray, objective” sites? Not really.
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