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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   2400 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What are your go-to news sources?

I always feel a step behind when it comes to the current administration’s actions. It usually takes about a month for the real substance—beyond the initial outrage-driven headlines—to reach me, along with the actual reasoning behind any given policy.

It also seems like much of the discourse is happening on Twitter, which is frustrating. I have a deep disdain for social media and have no desire to be more online than I already am.

Have to give a shout out to The Motte and the people that run it. It's a great resource.

I'd appreciate any recommendations you might have!

Realclearpolitics is a decent link aggregator, along with Realclearpolicy. You may get some mileage out of the other sites, too.

Similar to urquan, I'd mis-quote Twain. A man who reads nothing is uninformed, a man who reads the newspaper is misinformed.

For political news, I recently started watching Straight Arrow News on YouTube. Their whole deal is that they follow each news item with information on how the left and the right are spinning it. This is, of course, just as susceptible to partisan bias as any other news source, but generally the bias they present each side as having does seem to reflect what I notice about the bias each side is having (this, itself, is susceptible to confirmation bias on my part), and I think, at the very least, learning of the partisan biases along with the actual news information is helpful.

For similar reasons, I recently started watching the show Rising from The Hill, which follows news items with commentary by 2 commentators, one leftwing and one rightwing (the former seems to change often, while the latter is almost always Robby Soave, a libertarian from Reason magazine).

I use the Boring Report. Its an aggregator of MSM articles that uses AI to strip out everything but factual information about the events. It's not perfect, it does glitch out a fair amount and does things like only displaying the text of the site's cookie policies and stuff like that, and I wish it had better filtering options. You can click through to the articles its based on if you want to read the deceptive editorializing or see the unrelated photos. https://www.boringreport.org/app

I've been considering giving Ground News a try, but I'm still on the fence. I'd love to hear from any current users of it.

It's just an aggregator, though, which means it's no more of an improvement over its sources than statistics allows. It tries to help readers avoid left-vs-right bias, but I'm not sure what can be done to avoid journalism's more general biases toward clickbait, outrage porn, novelty, oversimplification, etc.

For the current administration's actions -- I'm not sure there is a news source that could keep you genuinely informed without just being outrage one way or the other. Things are moving too quickly for anything other than surface-level takes. The Trump administration seems to be doing the policy version of a gish gallop, where there's not enough time for anyone to form an opinion about any policy before the next big one drops. How people feel about that will depend on their politics, but it's certainly a strategy that's working in terms of drowning out opposition.

My response has been to disengage from political news. I get secondhand reports from friends and family on whatever drama's happening on Twitter and whatever the headlines are saying, but I don't read political news at this point. I used to always keep abreast of what was going on and even enjoyed talking about current events with people, but it's been so chaotic and so impossible to understand that I'm just numb to politics.

It's not what you asked, but my honest advice would be that there's no way to be more informed without becoming extremely online or devoting your life to exploring executive actions. The feeling you have is real, and it's shared by just about everyone.

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