This American Is Sold On Alternative News From Now On

I wouldn't feel confident of getting only the truth, with no spin, from rt.com, since the RT stands for "Russia Today," but I agree that its reporting of American issues seems to have been more informative, less slanted and more objective than the mainstream American media.

 

I check Russia Today for news as well, but I don't always think that they get it right either; but it is worth checking it. I think that RT is not one of the companies owned by the same big corporations that own Fox, CBS, CNN, and the others, and as far as I know they don't have family working in the Obama administration like most of the other stations have.

 

I watch one of the fringe news-sites, and they post a lot of information that actually comes from Russia, and it appears that Russia is not the Bad Guy Bully that we have been told for as long as I can remember. Back when I was a kid, my mom had newspaper clippings saved that told every American what we had to do if Russia dropped a bomb on America.
They have been portrayed as evil ever since then, but possibly only as an excuse for us to build up our military or attack other countries. This seems to be what we now think happened with Iraq, and the story of WMD not being real.
The translations that I have listened to of some of Putin's speeches, he seems like a reasonable man, and also one who truly cares about his country.
One of the things that I am hoping for with the Trump presidency is that we will build better relationships with Russia, and truly make them an ally, because I don't like or trust the idea of an alliance with China at all, although maybe that is possible, too.

 

There certainly is a market for informative news as far as people are concerned but I don't know whether it's a profitable one. There's the problem. People don't subscribe to newspapers; they read them online for free. People are moving away from networks. Advertisers have agendas or business concerns that affect the content of the news, and liberals are more likely to boycott, protest, or make demands than conservatives are, which probably has much to do with the fact that most news outlets are liberal. Businesses won't advertise on conservative sites or with conservative newspapers, but they will advertise in liberal outlets, because conservatives don't mix business with politics.

A neutral publication will be labeled conservative if they cover the conservative side objectively, while liberals consider a liberal bias to be objective, and everything to the right of liberal to be conservative.

Since consumers are no longer willing to pay for news and advertisers won't do business with a news outlet that carries a conservative message objectively, we're left with what we have. Conservative owned businesses won't advertise in conservative publications but they will advertise in liberal publications and anything to the right of liberal will be labeled conservative.

So there is no clear business plan for a neutral news outlet. You can make a profit if you cater to the liberals but you can't make a profit otherwise.

 

The alternative media is not altogether truthful, either, probably because they report a lot of what might be called gossip, and also many of them simply put their own spin on something.
A good example might be the news that was all over Youtube and Facebook that Newsweek had already printed the Madam President issue for Hillary, even before the election votes were counted, leading people to speculate even more that we were having an election that really didn't reflect the truth of who we wanted to elect for president.
However, it then came out that , although Newsweek actually did print this commemorative edition, they had also printed one for Donald Trump, so they could be ready and have the magazine out on the shelves for people to buy as soon as the winner was announced.

So, for me, at least, finding truth involves watching live coverage when something is actually happening, and then reading what is reported by both the news media, as well as some of the "youtube detectives", who take everything apart and look for errors in msm reporting.
There were all kinds of ideas on who would win the election, and why they thought that, and it was interesting to read through, and see the reasoning that was used for their predictions, but in the end, we had to just wait and see what happened.

 

Having published both a print newspaper and an online newspaper, I have a perspective on that. The mainstream media has a much larger budget for fact-checking and on lawyers to make sure that what they are publishing isn't going to get them in trouble. You might think that this would yield more factual stories from them, since they surely have the resources for that, but they also have an agenda. I think the agenda comes from two directions. One, it seems that journalist schools are teaching a liberal outlook to everything so what we might view as objective news, they would see as being conservative, while what we might consider to be conservative is viewed by them as being so far right that it shouldn't even be considered. What they view as objective looks liberal to us, while what they might view as liberal, we'd see as being in crazy left-land.

So a part of it is a matter of perspective, I think, and the scales are skewed to the liberal side. The other problem relates to what I said in an earlier post. Unable to make the kind of money they need from subscriptions or advertising, the mainstream news outlets are supported financially by wealthy people, corporations, and investors who want their interests to be met through the content of the paper, and nearly all of these are either liberal or neoconservative, with the neocons owning Fox News, while the balance of the media is owned by the liberals. That doesn't mean they won't run a story that is contrary to their perspective from time to time, or even carry a columnist or talking head from the other side, but the balance of the news from Fox News will be from a neoconservative perspective, while the bulk of what you read in most of the newspapers or hear from the mainstream news networks will be liberal. There are some exceptions. The Wall Street Journal has more of a neocon perspective that caters to the large corporations that are invested in it. When I lived in Southern California, the Orange County Register used to be owned by a Libertarian, and its editorials tended to be from a libertarian perspective, but I didn't notice that its news was biased in any particular direction. That has probably changed by now because its been forty years or more since I've read the Orange County Register.

Owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also has an interest in the Wall Street Journal, and is now acting CEO of Fox News, The New York Post has more of a neoconservative, and sometimes even a conservative perspective, but it tends toward the sensational, and is kind of a cross between a newspaper and a tabloid. It is known for its sensational and sometimes scandalous front pages.

As I said in my earlier post though, a newspaper with a liberal bent is fairly safe as far as advertising goes because conservatives don't mind advertising in liberal newspapers -- they don't tend to mix their politics with their business, but liberals will never advertise in a conservative publication, and will pull their advertising the first time an unbiased publication ran something that they disagreed with.

This is true of third-party web sites online too. That's why conservative web sites nearly always have gaudy advertisements from online companies that no one has ever heard of, since the more respectable companies are afraid they'll lose customers if they advertise on a conservative site. Lacking a lucrative income from advertising, conservative sites soon find that they don't have the resources to spend on fact-checking stories, so their only concern, too often, is whether running a story is likely to get them sued. For the same reason, they find that they don't have the money to hire people to cover regular news stories, and realizing that most people aren't going to turn to their web site or newspaper for their regular news anyhow, they tend to focus on the spectacular and to run stories before they are certain that they are factual. They also tend to use deceptive headlines and lead-ins, anything to get people to click on that link.

Years ago, when World Net Daily began, its mission was to offer an alternative to the liberal media, the idea was to offer its readers the conservative perspective on news stories. I have watched WND disintegrate over the years, to the point where I won't link to a story in World Net Daily because I know that no one will even bother to click on it once they see where it's from. They didn't start out crazy, though. I imagine that what happened is what I have suggested. Respectable advertisers wouldn't advertise on a conservative site. Lacking money, they couldn't afford to hire an adequate news staff, and they had to start accepting crazy advertisements from fly-by-night online companies, which only made their site even more unattractive to both readers and potential advertisers. Now, while they still occasionally break a story that later turns out to have been accurate, most of their stories are simply rehashed stuff that I've already read elsewhere and supposed news articles whose content isn't supported by the dramatic headline. They have also begun publishing more opinion than news. I still read them from time to time, but I'll look for confirmation from somewhere else before I'll link to one of their stories and, even then, I'm more likely to link to the site I got the confirmation from instead.

The Huffington Post began as a liberal blog by Arianna Huffington. Although Arianna Huffington was a Republican, married to a Republican politician, both she and her husband were far to the left politically, and I think her husband later came out as being gay or bisexual. Over time, the Huffington Post began publishing slightly more objective and newsworthy stuff, although it's still slanted well to the left. Today, it's owned by AOL and I don't think that Arianna Huffington is connected with it any longer. The reason why the Huff Post publishes more conservative content from time to time, I believe, is that they publish content submitted by other people, so when a conservative submits a newsworthy story or column, they'll publish it. I know they've published a lot of Roger Stone's stuff.

Changing subject a bit, one of the reasons why news sites might publish stories that are inaccurate is sometimes the result of bias, in that they are quick to believe something that they want to believe, such as some of the accusations against Donald Trump, but there is also a lot of pressure to be the first to publish a story.

Our print paper was a monthly so we didn't have that problem but when I published an online newspaper, I wanted to get my story up before the Bangor Daily News, which was the only statewide newspaper likely to cover stories in my area. I also wanted my stories to be factual, but I didn't have the resources that the BDN did. If I covered the story, I would also have to be the one to research it, and to enter it into the web site once it was ready to be published.

I don't think I did too badly with it, but there were times when I got something wrong. With an online publication, I could simply change the story if I found that something I had published was inaccurate or if new information became available, but I didn't consider it to be ethical to change it after it had been up for twenty-four hours. For the first hours after I published a story, I might make corrections, add to the story, or remove anything that I learned to be inaccurate. After 24-hourrs, I considered it to have been published, and if there was anything that needed to be corrected, I would do it as a note on the bottom of the story. That seemed fair, and that is pretty much what the BDN did. As a print newspaper with an online edition, they'd make changes to their stories online but once they published a story in print, they couldn't ask everyone for their newspaper back in order to replace them with a corrected copy. Now it's commonplace for newspapers to completely remove or replace anything that might embarrass them, and pretend that it never existed.

Tabloids like the National Enquirer have a huge legal budget so, while they aren't making up their actual news stories, they will push a sensational story to publication in order to be the first to break a national news story. They often are the first to break stories that are later covered in all of the mainstream news, so that might make them worth reading. However, they also get it wrong a lot, and have paid out a lot of money in lawsuits. I guess that works for them monetarily.

Third-party online news sites don't have the money to fight a defamation suit, but they also know that they probably don't have the money to make them worth suing, so if they are hit with a defamation suit, they'll simply shut their site down, and maybe pop back up later under another name. The longer a third-party site has been around, the more reliable it's likely to be because they now have an investment in their longevity and in their name.

Still, you can't believe everything you hear or read in the news. Some people lie, others are simply wrong, and still others might be looking at things from a different perspective.