The algorithms are motivated by ad impressions. Solution: seek out newspapers that are funded by subscriptions, not ads, the ones with stiffest paywalls. These would be Financial Times and WSJ. Chomsky called the FT "the only newspaper that tells the truth" because the readership and authors are aligned in their goal to make money from the news.
back
4 comments
As a long-time FT subscriber (over a decade, with my own money), I believe this is no longer true. They have become very woke over the past few years and are extremely selective in their political reporting and the slant they put on things. It’s no longer possible to pay only for the FT and end up fully and accurately informed, except in pure markets or finance topics. For anything political you may as well be reading the Guardian, which is free.
Yes Nassim Taleb said the same. When you want to read unbiased news, stick to financial newspapers, because business people don't want somebody's coloured opinion but simply the facts.
The Financial Times is absolutely biased on certain topics, for example US politics where they are extremely anti-Trump. It’s not that I want them to be pro-Trump, I’d just like to be accurately informed about him, given he’s one of the most powerful people on Earth and what he does moves markets. I don’t read the WSJ, but some people say the reverse bias is evident there.
Assuming there should be "no bias" for fiancial geared newspapers is a mistake. Their bias should be pro-operable facts and those who work on the implications which may be followed and considered even if wrong to know the current Zeitgeist. That might mean saying "Brexit would be an economic disaster for the nation" no matter how impolite it may be.
I agree, but the problem with the FT is that they’ve stopped capturing the whole zeitgeist on some topics. Telling half the story all the time leads to the sorts of surprises that financial market participants really don’t like. It’s a very strange strategy for the business they’re in. They did get sold a while back, and their editors have changed, so perhaps their subscription model has been struggling and they’re pivoting to the clickbait model.
I personally never read articles of FT nor WSJ - I don't even try to "click" on those links/references as I know that I won't be able to read them => I'll never have any chance to "understand" if I would like to subscribe to those newspapers :(
There are some free ones. Try their wirecard reporting. I find it pretty interesting.
Wirecard and me: Dan McCrum on exposing a criminal enterprise: https://www.ft.com/content/745e34a1-0ca7-432c-b062-950c20e41...
Thank you - but the ones that a freely available aren't marked in the headlines (e.g. "free"), or am I overlooking something?
Quite a few FT articles are free to read, and many others paywalled on the site are often syndicated to other, non-paywalled sites. A DDG search on the headline will often return such results. (I try, when submitting an FT article, to find a syndicated version as well and to post a link to it in comments immediately after submitting.)
Alternatively, and depending on your views about copyright etc, you can submit the article's url to archive.is - which will either return anything already "archived", or try to fetch it for you.
Thanks :) I didn't know "archive.is" => interesting/nice!
Still, I think that in the case of well-known newspapers I probably won't try to work around their policies (difficult to explain the reason as I'm not sure myself about the "why" - maybe a mix of ethics and other stuff specific to newspapers).
WSJ has ads doesn’t it?
I've been thinking of subscribing to the WSJ, as I'm getting pretty tired of advocacy based news.
The WSJ is not immune to the cycle. Based on this analysis,
https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1247368592791949313
Wokeist trends usually originate in the WaPo, percolate through the NYT and eventually end up in the WSJ, all happening predictably with a time lag of 2-5 years
Interesting statistics! But I am not quite convinced use of various new terms necessarily conforms with advocacy.
All news outfits are biased, including the WSJ, but some try a lot harder than others to be unbiased, and some have given up all pretense of being news.