TV and news

[juliet]

I was subjected to TV for the first time in about 5 months today (sat in hostel lounge, which has large TV which other ppl came to start watching). I was not particularly edified by this experience.

However, it did remind me that I've also been paying v little attention to any sort of news, since I left the UK. Whilst I have no intention of getting my news from the TV, now or probably ever (and the 10 min of TV news I saw today merely confirmed this bias), I'm not actually sure what a good source *is*.

Thus I turn to the internets. Where do you get your news from? Bearing in mind that I really want to spend as little time on this as is commensurate with being a reasonably well-informed citizen, and also that I am a cynical hippy-type who mistrusts the media in general[0].

TBH I'm far from sure that it's not better for my mental state to avoid the news altogether unless something is pushed on my awareness (e.g. via LJ/DW, or *really big* newspaper headlines, but see above re informed citizen.

I could of course rely on dogrando going DID YOU SEE over IM when he reads the Guardian alert email, but this seems like cheating.

[0] Ideally of course this would entail seeking out multiple sources & cross-referencing etc etc but see above re time, also IME this just ends up making me cross, especially if any of those sources are e.g. the Telegraph.

Comments

[drplokta]

The BBC news site at http://news.bbc.co.uk/ will certainly cover anything important, and has good worldwide coverage.

[juliet]

Yeah, I've previously used their email alert service, but (before I left the UK) I was increasingly unimpressed by the shallowness of their coverage and tendency to focus on "Were You Affected By X? Tell Us All About It!" side of things.

[flick]

Plus, tbh, the faux news stories that are just plugging a TV show. But it is still where I mostly get my news from.

[azurelunatic]

I follow the BBC World News headline feeds on my reading page on LJ, and a local news feed service on Twitter.

Oh! Also The Register's headlines.

[juliet]

You're the second person to suggest twitter! I should look into this. thanks :)

[karen2205]

Being terribly British and middle class I get a lot of news from Radio 4; I usually find it calmer and less sensational than television coverage. I also use the BBC news website a lot from work - that's mainly inertia as I trust the BBC more than I trust most news organisations and I haven't spent much time looking at other news websites to see what else is available.

[juliet]

I'm no longer as convinced as I was by the BBC (see comment above). I used to listen to the Today programme but found it increasingly infuriating, which seems like an unpleasant start to the day...

I am def not interested in TV coverage; IME it's far too inclined towards the sensational and/or shallow.

[djm4]

I don't check it nearly as often as I should, but Aj Jazeera is excellent for getting a non-UK (and often non-Western) angle on the news.

[juliet]

That's an excellent suggestion, thank you. I might look into their RSS feed.

[londonparticular]

I use BBC News and then Google News (what I like is the ease of finding a large number of articles from different sources) or Guardian it for anything I want to know more of/different views on. RSS feeds from the major UK papers I find useful, just as a headline skim.

I third the Twitter rec, though, subscribing to news feeds on there has turned out surprisingly useful. It's also pretty interesting to search any hashtags for user commentary. A by no means exhaustive list of news outlets on Twitter.

/I should let you know - I subscribed when damned_colonial linked to you in a post. Hello :).

[zebrallama]

I recommend the RSS feed from Richard Stallman's site: http://www.stallman.org/rss/rss.xml

Very ironically (I presume you know who Richard Stallman is, and hence the irony) it's not working at the moment because of a parsing error. But I'm sure it will be back soon.

[zebrallama]

P.S. IMO Stallman covers all the most important issues, with one exception, which is animal rights. I have heaps of other sources for that. The best, if you're (planning to be) in the UK, is probably Compassion In World Farming. But I spect you knew that.

Stallman's coverage is idiosyncratic, but that's kind of the point. I want to know what's important, not what the Establishment thinks is newsworthy. Very occasionally I need to know what the Establishment thinks, and then I ask my dad! (Not that he's very Establishment himself, but he's a news junkie.)

[juliet]

Thanks for the recommendation - I'll try it for a bit & see if the idiosyncracies irritate me too much :)

[zebrallama]

Oh, also, if you're interested in the meta stuff about the state of mainstream news (which is totally not what you asked for, I know), look up John Pilger. He's spot on, and quite entertaining too.

[aquaeri]

I've had RSS feeds of BBC and (Australian) ABC, but like you I'm getting more and more disaffected by the BBC: the triviality, the lack of usefulness in many headlines etc. I'd prefer to just skim the headlines to see what Big Media thinks is important. It sounds like I should have a look at Al Jazeera too.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't go snogging any pigs right now, that's all.

[juliet]

I know that now! Thanks to a *criminally* rubbish piece on the local TV news (started "So, why haven't we closed our borders already, then?"), I went looking on google news. But yeah, it did occur to me that possibly I should already have known about this, though being A Big Cynic my current conclusion is that unless you're actually in Mexico it's prob a bit early to be panicking.

Crap Australian TV news

[geekboyoz.livejournal.com]

I assume that you were watching one of the commercial networks, which yes are the TV equivalent of the tabloids.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

Twitter and a healthy dose of cynicism. Following C4, Guardian and BBC News online journos can be useful.

[juliet]

I hadn't thought of twitter! Hm. Thanks.

Twitter

[geekboyoz.livejournal.com]

Twitter has reached an interesting penetration level where you can realistically turn to it for a sense of what is happening in the world - although as with many things interweb there is probably a US bias.

#hashtags is an interesting site that produces trend graphs based on #hashtags from the full Twitter timeline (the nice folks at Twitter love to share their stuff via the API).

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

dogrando's DID YOU SEEs are probably heavier on cute beast news and lighter on weighty political matters than a sensible mix is.

I keep an eye on the Guardian and the BBC. And then a google for anything that looks like I want to know more about it.

[juliet]

Indeed yes, there is that. Cute beast news & ppl being monumentally irritating are usually the things that make it through the dogrando filter.

Guardian & BBC have been my previous defaults, since both do an email-alert thing, but see boyofbadgers below re BBC & dumbing down, & also Grauniad & prejudices. But yeah, Google for Further Info is handy.

[catsgomiaow.livejournal.com]

Mostly the BBC website, although I have noticed a DISTINCT decline in e.g. spelling/editing on there lately (they were talking about Princess Leah from Star Wars the other day, for example, and a few weeks ago were talking about the "dismissal" of Madeleine McCann). I will also look at the graun website from time to time and get the paper graun/observer at weekends, though I fear I spend more time reading the recipes/fashion bits/middle class furniture lust bits than reading the actual NEWS :(

[juliet]

aw, man, I gave up buying the Sat Graun partly b/c I never, ever, ever read the proper bits & only ever read the magazine & looked at furniture etc :( HIPPY FAIL.

(Actually this reminds me of another thought I had about how my consumerist lusts have been greatly reduced by a) the awareness that anything I buy has to be shipped/carried home or abandoned, & b) v rarely going anywhere near shops or seeing, y'know, people, b/c working from home ekt.)

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Graun online is OK, but I am painfully aware of it pandering to my own prejudices. I've pretty much given up on the BBC news site, mostly cos of its maddening tendency to over-simplify everything. TBH, I get most of my ambient sense of what is going on in the world from the 5 to 15 minutes I spend in bed each morning getting progressively more annoyed at J. Humphrys, J. Naughtie and co.

[juliet]

The things you say about the Graun & the BBC are partly where I'm coming from, as well!

I gave up on R4 of a morning ages ago because it got me SO FVCKING PISSED OFF and I did not like that as a way to start the day. 6Music is much less irritating but their bare 60secs of news are only 30secs of actual *news* and 30secs of Music Celeb Bollocks, so... :-/

[bob]

it has to be said that actual news reporting in the guardian isnt that biased. unlike say the mail.

Sources of news

[geekboyoz.livejournal.com]

Myself I use Google Reader to aggregate a number of sources using RSS. My main source is the ABC (being Australian), but the BBC and many other "reputable" news outlets provide a variety of feeds.

I just then skim the headlines and excerpts, diving into the full story when something grabs me. Of course then Google is your friend to do a little wider research as desired.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

You could download programmes from radio 4 or the world service, and then listen to them while Doing Something Else. Radio 4 updates its headlines piece throughout the day and also has several longer programmes for download too; I haven't investigate the WS on this but I expect it's similar.

Your question seems to imply that the BBC isn't the perfect reliable source of all objective truths. Er, pardon?

[juliet]

Listening to stuffs is no good, sadly: the first thing to get edited out when I'm concentrating (or sometimes when I'm not concentrating) is the ears. Lectures were always next-to-useless to me as well (this improved significantly when I started knitting during them in my most recent degree). Which is a shame b/c I'd like to listen to the World Service more often.

My opinion on the BBC oscillates. I think they *can* do some very good stuff, but I am increasingly unimpressed with what I read on the website.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Yes it's a fair point about the website oversimplifying. I don't read it much. However I tend to think radio 4 news excellent and the world service even better (and without any of the irritations of Humpfries, if you don't like him. I do, but quite see why people don't).

However, this may be a quasi-religious view rather than based on any careful analysis.

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

I get my news from Radio 2 in the mornings, interspersed with Wogan.

[licon.livejournal.com]

I get my news from a combination of the NY Times, the Times, and the BBC News website. Between the three I can generally get a reasonable picture, and I know where their biases lie.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I am a h0 for the BBC website's trashy pieces (esp useless showbiz gossip or 'man, 47, turns into tractor') but I've stopped relying on it for Proper news because it has gone well rub. I generally check the Graun website every day but rarely tend to read further than the headlines (they've upped the quality of their puns recently, tick vg well done the Graun subbers) unless it is similarly trashy tractor-metamorphosis or it looks like there might be a GRAPH underneath.

If something majorly important happens I generally first find out about on R4 (early mornings), werk colleagues going 'DID YOU SEE' (later mornings) or LJ (the rest of the time). Or the Metro if I've left my commuting book at home. Cynicism definitely required.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

news.bbc every day, both their main page and an RSS-to-IRC feed of the BBC's news articles at work; Times/Guardian/Telegraph websites some lunchtimes. These tend to cover roughly the same stories, but not entirely and you do get different angles. People mention stuff on IRC/LJ/etc which fills in some of the gaps in the mainstream.

I also read the Economist on paper weekly, though I don't often get to the end before the next one arrives (and I won't run a backlog). Its stories tend to be more analytical than the stuff-happens/people-talk you get in daily or online news sources.

Also The Register but of course that's IT-specific (err (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/28/chav_fighting/), mostly (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/28/abso_breach/)) and so probably not what you were after as such.

[juliet]

I probably *should* read The Register...

Oh god, the trouble with all of this is that it's just so much *work*, and I am incredibly lazy. [sigh] I mean, I would kind of like to read the Economist, and I even subscribed to New Internationalist for a bit, but I just never got round to reading it. Some kind of feed from the Guardian/BBC is prob going to be the best bet.

FAIL AT NEWS.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I have a tab group with various things I read regularly in which I open over breakfast. I follow cartoons the same way. It takes some of the effort and means you have to actively dismiss things you don't want to read right now rather than simply fail to visit them (slightly like the way trn would keep on giving you more to read for as long as you mindlessly pressed ' '). For paper news sources though I find I just have to bite the bullet and make time.