A Progressive Media Guide
Domain: Mass media
Context: A daily news briefing, with commentary
It would be wonderful to find a news source that was politically, philosophically, economically, and historically literate, had bureaus around the world for newsgathering, was fearlessly committed to reporting the truth objectively, and actually knew the truth when it saw it.
Very unfortunately indeed, there is no such news source on the entire planet.
And there never has been.
Barring that, it would at least be good to have a watchdog that recognized flagrant propaganda when it saw it, was willing to call it out, and could at least broadly distinguish between that sort of propaganda and something closer to the truth.
There are, remarkably enough, three of those. Two good ones are the British Media Lens and, in the US, FAIR. Both are well worth tuning in.
However, the winner, for our money, is Swiss Propaganda Research. The site is mostly written in German, but they do have some indispensable pages available in English. SPR has manged to do what the American media has proved almost entirely incapable of: being aware that the neoliberal/neofascist Council on Foreign Relations has been calling the shots in American foreign and domestic policy ever since the days of Teddy Roosevelt – and always, always, always getting every aspect of politics and economics disastrously wrong.
Trying to understand American politics and foreign policy without this understanding is like trying to fight with a strait-jacket on and one foot in a bucket of concrete.
The SPR pages in English may be seen here.
Among the most valuable of those pages is their Media Navigator, which maps out the English-speaking media in terms of their political stance (ranging from liberal to conservative) versus their relationship to power, the latter including, largely, ties to the Council on Foreign Relations. The Navigator may be seen here.
Its page explaining the crucial significance of media ties to the CFR resides here.
Here is its CFR cross-affiliations page.
And for its CFR and links to the media map go here.
Using the SPR classification, we can divide the Anglo-American media into three critical groups: the lunatic right, which promulgates industrial strength neo-fascist propaganda, and should be required to carry a bio-hazard stamp on all of its stories and editorials; the compromised left, which has undesirable ties to unaccountable power, and tends to favor corporate democrats and policies that tinker around the edges of the big problems; and the legitimate left, which sometimes gets the big picture right, even if it is almost always lacking in any sort of coherent ideological perspective.
Here are those media groupings.
The Lunatic Right - Industrial strength neo-fascist propaganda at its worst:
Fox News
Wall Street Journal
The Washington Times
Daily Mail
The New York Post
National Review
Commentary
The American Conservative
The Washington Examiner
The Compromised Left:
Huffington Post
The Daily Beast
Vice Media (but one founding member was a 'Proud Boy')
CNN (now leaning further right)
MSNBC
The Guardian
The Washington Post
Politico
Buzz Feed
BBC
NPR
ABC
Slate
The Nation
The Young Turks
And, finally, The Legitimate Left:
World Socialist Web Site (now censored by Google)
The most actual news will be found at the Democracy Now and Real News sites, which makes them the best places to start for a daily briefing. For true investigative journalism, The Intercept generally gets first prize, but keep an eye on Project Censored. For commentary AlterNet, Truthdig and Truthout are usually the stand-outs, though Common Dreams deserves an honorable mention.
In addition to these outlets for news and commentary, we think the world would benefit from paying far more attention to news from those countries adhering to the "Nordic model", which provide their citizens with the best empirical outcomes in governance (and health, too). There are seven of these; and, in addition, we believe that Japan leads the world culturally, for a total of the “great eight”. News in English is available from most of these, such as:
Japan: The Asahi Shimbun
News on Japan
Norway: The Local
News in English
Finland: News Now Finland
Helsinki Times
Sweden: Nordstjernan
The Local
Related Topics at EP
We'll soon be putting up specialized information sources for financial news, health, economic think tanks, and so on.
