Unbiased American Politics?

Does anybody have any sites that show American politics and foreign policies? Its tough to get the full story even with google, and I know there are some very involved political discussions on here, so I was wondering if there were any suggestions from the community.

flubbernugget said:

Does anybody have any sites that show American politics and foreign policies? Its tough to get the full story even with google, and I know there are some very involved political discussions on here, so I was wondering if there were any suggestions from the community.

Ironically, some of the less biased American news coverage can be found on news sites other than the States.

>Unbiased politics
>American

Yeah, no.

Technician said:

Ironically, some of the less biased American news coverage can be found on news sites other than the States.

That's because the rest of the world in general is more level-headed.

Aljazeera has some pretty good English news, although they're not American. And all news companies are biased in some way, maybe not like FOX, but still be careful.

Fair warning, I'm a Democrat.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that what you're asking for is oxymoronic (there's no such thing as unbiased politics), it's also nowhere to be found in the media. It's not that all media is biased (although it certainly all is), its that issues are almost universally too complex to fit in 8 square inches of column space or 4 minutes of cable news coverage.

Immigration is a good example. Most people agree that illegal immigration harms the U.S. economy, specifically the economies of border states. The facts are far more complicated than that however. Illegal immigration only adversely affects American high school dropouts, incomes for other income groups are not affected at all. To delve even deeper, U.S. commerce & industry relies on cheap immigrant labor (almost universally provided by illegal immigrant migrant workers) to keep prices down. Georgia alone lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to unharvested crops because illegal immigration plateau'd after 2010 due to the Great Recession.

In fact, most of the "economic harm" comes from enforcement of xenophobic U.S. immigration policy post-9/11. Reinforcing the border alone has cost billions, but the big cost is the fact that we now detain immigrants for indefinite periods of time (often not long but longer than not at all) before deporting them, whereas pre-Patriot Act they were deported immediately. This has required huge amounts of new prison space and prison officials.

In order to find this information out, you have to source nearly a dozen different sources, many of which are fatally dry. No news organization will risk losing its audience after 90 seconds of trying to inform people about (for example) illegal immigrant use of medical facilities (they almost never use them btw).

You also have to sort through obvious propaganda, or even just badly-managed sources. For example, a lot of people like to argue that the U.S. spends tens of billions educating the children of illegal immigrants, but the method they (FAIR, the Federation of Americans for Immigration Reform) used to get to these numbers (we educate 50 million kids, illegal immigrants are 5% of the population, therefore 2.5 million illegal kids must be in classrooms) is just pathetically, hopelessly inaccurate.

Long story short, you're not gonna find a media outlet that does any of this. The best you can do stateside is This Week with George Stephanopoulos (ABC) and The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC). This Week has maybe the best political insight on TV today, and TRMS has probably the best investigative political unit you can find anywhere - Maddow's show often drives the news cycle for the coming day, if not the foreseeable future (see voting and abortion rights for two). On the negative, Stephanopoulos can be a pushover and Maddow uses loaded language and doesn't always give the other side a fair chance. For print media, the New York Times is the best paper there ever has been, claims of liberal bias are laughable (accepting global warming and not accepting supply-side economics is reasonable, not liberal). You can try the Associated Press, but there tends to not be enough context.

EDIT:

For insider-politics stuff, you really can't beat Real Clear Politics (RCP)

flubbernugget said:

Unbiased Politics

That's the ultimate oxymoron.

Using many sources is a good suggestion. I'd also add learning one or more extra languages. Everyone has an agenda, and this extends beyond individuals, for any given culture or country you can identify certain values or opinions that are almost universally shared, and due to that often ill-defined. Having an outsider perspective on a local problem can sometimes give you more insight than any other source of information.

I usually try to find 3 articles on the same discussion - one left-slanted, one right-slanted, and one foreign/centered. Usually helps me find the common facts buried underneath the source's language. Also, I try to avoid the Big 3 networks (CNN, MSNBC, FOX) like the plague. They all suffer from the same sensationalist, bullshit approach that I loath.

I tend to trust sources like RT, Reuters, Al Jazeera and PressTV over any of the US-based ones. But it's anyone's best guess as to what any journalists' motives might be when writing their articles. "Unbiased" probably doesn't exist. It's more a case of choosing who's bias you want to believe, or hearing both sides of the story and making your own mind up.