> At the very least, you mostly know who they are.

Which means pretty much nothing. It's not like you live in the same community as the authors of news articles. There's very little you can do individually that can affect them.

It used to be that you were more likely to actually be in the same on-line community as the blogger providing alternative take on events (it's not the same as being in the same physical community, but it's not nothing), but I guess it's rarely the case these days.

I don't have any solutions here. I generally trust neither the mainstream nor alternative sources, which leads me to form weak or no opinions on events in the news - but it's all context-specific. There are bloggers who I trust to be accurate and honest. There are topics on which I feel I can safely take traditional news reporting at face value. There are topics where I accept we'll have to wait a couple years before we get some reliable information.

Certainly, they are more reputable. But I think that a healthy level of skepticism is good and not flat out believing anything from reputable sources is to be expected.

In the US, the New York Times has perhaps the best reputation but they distributed false stories leading up to and during the Iraq war.

I don’t like this idea of “good” sources and “bad” sources and don’t think people should promote trusting sources that are deemed “good.”

Herman and Chomsky write about this in the 80s [0] and I think it’s still valid today. I don’t think we should promote narratives of dualistic struggles, especially if we are presented as being on the righteous side.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

I find disturbing how a large portion of the general USA public is apparently convinced that the NYT and CNN are leftist orgs (due to a general political realignment that left not being socially reactionary and imperialism clustered, as far as I understand).

As someone who generally falls further to the left than the right, and sometimes much further, I would agree that those are generally left biased news outlets.

Here's a site that does a pretty decent job of ranking bias per article and per outlet:

https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/ratings

If you count averages, I agree, but I would argue that the bulk of what makes the NYT nominally left wing is very safe signaling on almost stereotypically caviar gauche issues, while they're not left wing when it could actually matter or is hard.

According to Media Bias Fact Check, CNN is left-bias and NYT is left-center bias. That's as close as you can get to an impartial judgement.

You really can't model this on a single axis.

Any political labeling system, regardless of number of axes, is going to drop details and fail to capture all the ways in which political opinions can vary. That doesn't mean that all labeling systems are equally informative, but it also means that you can indeed model political leaning on a single axis. If you do that, you will absolutely miss details bout the bias of the NYT, but you will also find that the NYT bias tends toward the left.

It is also true that while the NYT generally is biased to the left, some of its articles and editorials can still be biased to the right.

I think the argument would be to not simplify judgement of things.

But left/right is a single axis. If you’re measuring left/right bias then you’re going to have a single axis.

A different argument is only the quality or usefulness of a media outlet. That’s definitely more dimensions and one would be left/right bias.

Another data point from Pew polling: People who identify the NYT as their main source of news also identify as Democrats 91% of the time and Republicans only 7%.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m...

20% of people think the world is flat. I stopped finding it disturbing what large portions of the public think.

I don’t think this is unique to the US either. People believe crazy things (or perhaps just like trolling pollsters).

I’m not even sure what a “leftist org” means.

On average maybe, but not necessarily.

When thinking critically, be mindful of sub-perceptual heuristics.