It's not completely without bias (no one is, especially the BBC running scared of their own shadow post-Hutton), but it is a good place to find other points of view and shows some incredible documentaries and highlights some stories from around the world that western news channels just ignore either because of cost, because they are beholden to corporate sponsors or because it's just not entertaining enough.
As with the BBC, having state sponsorship can actually work well to provide funding to fill in the gaps that market-driven news leaves behind.
Yes, it happens that the country sponsoring Al Jazeera is a piece of shit for human rights and democracy but this isn't reflected in the output of AJE which feels like it has a good degree of editorial independence. It's not Russia Today by any means.
BBC is anti-Russia, but more neutral on other issues.
I find the Economist very politically motivated and stopped reading it.
It is expensive, $6/week or $10/week (I don't know the meaning of the difference between their standard and premier access levels), but definitely worthwhile if you share with a whole household or coffeeshop.
The South China Morning Post (scmp.com) is also worth taking a look at it, especially now that it's free. It's not quite the same caliber as the FT and it has less coverage of American news, but it's even further removed from Anglo-American media circles so offers an interestingly detached perspective while still speaking a familiar political and social language.
I just recently renewed my FT subscription, though, after I let it lapse. I had dropped it favor of a SCMP subscription a couple of years ago. The FT price increases were relentless. But I never ended up reading the SCMP much and didn't even realize it had become free until recently. FT lowered their rates slightly, and given recent events I decided to start reading it again.
I'm hesitant to call the FT neutral, though. Their journalistic culture is closer than most to the traditional Anglo-American laissez-faire descriptivist business culture (borderline amoral) that most Anglophone outlets moved far away from long ago. (In all fairness, they moved away from it partly because that culture was and still is often times dangerously indistinguishable from complicity wrt slavery, apartheid, authoritarianism, etc.) It's honest but still elitist. Perhaps being elitist is what has allowed it to stay above the fray better than other outlets like the Wall Street Journal or the Economist.
The FT is also de facto internationalist given it's readership and industry focus, which is why so many commenters in their forums seem to presume they're anti-Brexit. (Also, when did their forums get so popular? Returning after a couple of years, it feels like the newspaper equivalent of Eternal September.)
I guess those things have made them effectively largely neutral on a wide range of topics of interest, especially to American readers. But it also means the FT doesn't do serious investigate reporting, or to analyze issues very deeply, outside of industry pieces. I like to think of the FT as a reflection of the consensus opinion (or lack of opinion, as the case may be) among the international elite. And that reflection doesn't make a lot of sense unless you bring a lot of pre-existing knowledge to the table, including an already decent awareness of historic and current events, and the intellectual culture of that elite. (Which is definitely not the same as the culture of the academic elite, although there's significant overlap.)
To understand what I mean about the FT being elitist and internationalist, people unfamiliar with the FT should know that it's common for high-level politicians like Secretaries of State, Foreign Secretaries, and even Prime Ministers and Presidents; and for powerful businessmen with multinational interests to publish commentaries through the FT knowing that they're quickly reaching an international audience with many in similarly powerful positions as themselves. In order to remain such a neutral outlet the FT is purposefully often very restrained in how they approach various topics. As I insinuated above, occasionally that restraint comes across more as stilted analysis, an awkward omission, or even deafening silence.
Foreign papers are a good way to get a different perspective. Especially important when the topic is US foreign policy. I like British and Australian ones.
I wish I had a sane US conservative media outlet to recommend. Surely there is one? For the libertarian angle on current events, reason.com is a decent substitute. But that's mostly opinion, not news reporting.
* The Economist (left-leaning but has good reporting)
* Wall Street Journal
* BBC
* Christian Science Monitor
The Financial Times is another good one.
http://aboutus.ft.com/corporate-information/ft-company/adver...
(Yes, people don't like paying a fee and seeing ads, but (a) that's reality and (b) the complaints are an arbitrary binary viewpoint that lacks foundation)
Could be, there's a reason for that. With some things, the two sides do not really merit the same consideration. Slavery, for instance is an easy one, not something where you need 'fair and balanced' coverage of 'both sides of the issue'. Not comparing Trump to slavery, mind you, but from their editorial stance, he combines a number of worryingly illiberal qualities that are antithetical to their position. They were (and are) the same way about Silvio Berlusconi, despite not having a lot in common with some of his past left-wing opposition.
The Economist certainly have done this, they used to do one every few months. It's strange, I'd say charter schools were a very "neoliberal" policy.
It's hard to call them "news", but they do important research and expose
the economist is pro imf/world bank.
that is less pro globalisation and more pro * poorer nations for the Western profit incentive.
which isnt quite an equivalence.
The Economist's mission statement is, almost literally, to advance neoliberal (unrelated to the canonical American definition of 'liberal') thought and policies across the globe. Any further to the right, and you would be in the territory of Mises/Friedman/Hayek, with privatized roads and 'gold standards'.
It concerns me that people can consider the economist "left-leaning", it shows how far to the right the U.S. (and with it much of the world) has shifted.
The U.S. was way ahead of the rest of the world on this, and has always been a lot more conservative than Europe, but it's cultural influence has had the effect of moving Europe to the right by painting the middle ground as "left wing" so Europe makes concessions on things like privatisation of infrastructure (e.g. for better or worse privatisation of telecommunications in Europe in the 80s was pushed by the US).
It hasn't been all bad of course, part of the reason the recent election result is so painful is because progressive poltics has made a huge amount of progress.
In 25 years the US has gone from racist, homophobic and dealing with the effects of prohibition (the "war on drugs") to the society we have now which is dealing with it's issue of race far better than Europe (which continues to bury it's head in the sand over the issue), allowing gay marriage, serving in the military regardless of (open) sexual preference, and de-criminalising or legalising cannabis.
The US has faced up and is dealing with it's racism problem. Europe always saw itself as "nowhere near as bad as the US", which was true when the US had lynchings. And there is still plenty of work to the done in the US particularly around the justice system and other institutional effects which lead back to social injustice. But the trajectory is there for the US, while in Europe it feels like racism is a growing problem which isn't being tackled at all.
So it's understandable that people who were already set in their ways 25 years ago (indeed many current voters were approaching retirement 25 years ago) see the modern world and react with horror at all the progress.
Trump said he's going to "win so much we'll be sick and tired of winning", well Trump isn't a winner, progressives should be shouting that Trump is weak if he's tired of winning because he's won an election or two, because progressives have been winning for 25 years and we're not going to get tired of winning any time soon.
So the dramatic shift to the right has to been in context. The sky isn't going to fall but while huge progress has been made on social issues; on issues such as economic policy, policing and commercial rights there has been a slow constant erosion and shift to the right.
So the shift to the right socially is dangerous because reversing canoe from paddling upstream against a right-wing under-current will act as an enabler where you can quickly find yourself in shit creek without a paddle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism
It's perfectly possible to disagree with them on a variety of issues, but pigeonholing them as 'left' or 'right' is inaccurate.
-With all due respect, calling The Economist left-leaning makes about as much sense as calling Marx a right deviationist.
On the assumption that your comment is sincere - what would, in your book, be an example of a neutral or even right-leaning newspaper? (I am genuinely curious)
I thought this article described rather well the main problem with the media today and how it could get back on the right path:
https://popehat.com/2016/12/15/deserving-trust/
The mainstream media is just as responsible for the rise of fake news as anything else, if not more so. If it didn't give people a reason to distrust it as acting not out of principle, but out of love for a certain faction of the government, perhaps fake news wouldn't be such an issue today, because most people would keep reading the same mainstream press, knowing they can trust it.
Out of curiosity, can you point our their bias regarding Qatar? What kind of bias I should be aware of when watching them?
I don't have time or interest to dig into Qatars politics, but maybe you can give some hints what to look forward, since you sound like someone who knows the deal.
I think the reason for the sudden prominence of negative Trump coverage was to address serious backlash the Washington Post was receiving. The Washington Post and other newspapers were giving enormous amounts of free media coverage to the Trump campaign up until the Republican National Convention. The Washington Post overcompensated by deluging readers with opinion pieces to overcome this criticism.
I hope that the interest in opinion pieces will wane, but we will see.
I want to read about the war in Syria, ISIS, finance, the American economy, and technology. This stuff should be the mainstay of any U.S. paper.