I agree with Ed Brayton: these so-called news sites truly suck.
Occupy Democrats
Bipartisan Report
Winning Democrats
PoliticusUSA
Blue Nation Review
IfYouOnlyNews
USUncut
The Freethought Project
Addicting Info
LiberalAmerica
Newslo
Politicalo (almost anything that ends on lo; these sites specialize in taking accurate statements from politicians and then adding false quotes to them that are much worse than what they actually said)
DailyNewsBin
theintellectualist
Being Liberal
American Newsx
The Other 98%
There are others. I notice that he forgot to include the Fox network (anything owned by Rupert Murdoch, actually), Breitbart, and World Net Daily.
Every once in a while, they do say something interesting or newsworthy, but they’re so bad otherwise that you still need to check with other, more reliable news sites to verify…so maybe you should be linking to those, anyway.
Well, his post does say this list is specifically about liberal-leaning sites.
I would add The Raw Story – they’re good when they’re noting something that was in a video or audio source that wouldn’t see text coverage without them, but their text articles are usually just reblogs of actual news sources with a hugely spun headline designed to elicit liberal clickbait outrage.
Good list: don’t link from those. That said, I’ve found that even normally reliable sites will have crap stories – my BS meter pings when a story is too outrageous or funny or silly, and then I check where they got it from, and who else is covering it.
I’ve come across Politicus several times recently. I just assumed it was linked to the Clinton campaign or a Clinton PAC and checked with other sites before linking there or elsewhere. I had no idea it was billed as some sort of independent news site.
Had I previously seen a link to something called Freethought Project, I would’ve likely clicked.
Via DuckDuckGo, I’ve already seen enough to veer off:
If Gawker were still a thing, would it be among them?
I’ll share memes/quotations on images mostly* regardless of source, provided the content itself isn’t misleading or inaccurate, but generally won’t link any of those sites (among others). For self contained bits of information or opinion like that, the content seems far more important than the source when judging. Articles are a different matter though.
*Obviously misogynists and racists and other varieties of Nazi scum are out, but that’s self selecting on the ‘isn’t misleading or inaccurate’ criteria anyway.
I rarely link anything provocative or critical of the US government without vetting, but I’m curious: what exactly are these “more reliable news sites” I should be linking? The New York Times? Washington Post? Because when it comes to matters of consequence, those are the ones needing the most vetting.
Iris Vander Pluym @ # 8: …: what exactly are these “more reliable news sites” …
Won’t include links to elude the filters, but I like:
commondreams.org
digby’s blog at salon.com
tomdispatch.com
rewire.news
consortiumnews.com
rightwingwatch.org & talk2action.org for tracking wingnuts & hyperchristians respectively.
alternet, rawstory, salon, & motherjones often have good stuff, but you have to wade through varying amounts of fluff to find it.
So far, the revived Al-Jazeera hasn’t let me down, but I haven’t used it enough to have a firm opinion. Guardian.co.uk has an ambitious US project underway, with some good reporting and some clickbait.
Pierce R. Butler @ 9: I agree with you. My view is that no source is objective, and the worst are those that fancy themselves Special Snowflakes immune to journalistic (i.e. human) bias.
I’m down to “Trust nobody. And verify.”
applehead @6
Can’t tell if this is a serious inquiry or if it’s a subtle rhetorical gloat.
What do y’all know about samuel-warde.com (Liberals Unite)? Stories pop up in my facebook newsfeed from time to time; the headlines hit so many of my personal dogwhistles that I feel like it can’t possibly be a solid source.
@9 Pierce R. Butler — yes, several of those are dependably cynical, Vox is okay, DU is okay, the BlackAgendaReport and SalvageBleak and LatinoRebels and Jacobin and InTheseTimes will make you rethink your first-world lily-white middle-class assumptions….but they aren’t updated regularly enough to be “news”. They are gripping essays, from a different perspective, but that’s a different matter.
The problem with HuffPo and DailyKos and Salon are that they have such incompetent editors. Amanda Marcotte, for example, is pretty damn good at feminist polemical jiu-jitsu, she sees a particular double-standard or hypocrisy a she shreds it. But she often lapses into teenage gum-smacking — using “super” as an adverb, saying “wevs” (“whatever” would be lazy and pointless as well), saying the single worst journalistic phrase of the past 24-36 months, “because, reasons”, which no decent editor would ever tolerate, because it’s both smug AND devoid of communication, etc. Stuff that any decent high-school English teacher wouldn’t tolerate, let lone a real editor. I swear, if a decent editor tidied up her little attempts to sound college-campus-hip in her mid-40s, she could be as good as Digby.
There are several other examples of pretty good essayists on Salon and HuffPo and Kos and those mainstream news consolidator and opinion sites, who would be thoroughly readable if they had an editor, but have gotten lazy because they don’t.
The other problem with most of the “liberal” blogs is that they are closer to “progressive” — they drive a Prius and have been to a gay wedding or two, but they wouldn’t know a rank-and-file union member if one bit them in the ass. Vegetarianism and using the correct words for someone whose gender orientation is amorphous are laudable enough foci, if that’s what you think will change the world, don’t get me wrong. But the Fight For Fifteen and making the connection between worker oppression in Southeast Asia or Mexico and declining opportunity here? Crickets. Our Fifty Year War of petro-colonialism? Maybe an occasional tsk-task at drones or Netanyahu. The high-school-to-prison pipeline and the disenfranchisement of black men in all 11 states of the former Confederacy? Yawn.
They like eyeballs for their sponsors, so they come up with the latest outrageous thing some asshole said on Fox, rather than reporting on genuine problems. And except for Taibbi and Digby and Yglesias and one or two others, their writers DESPERATELY need a good old-fashioned editor to read them the riot act from the Chicago Manual and Elements Of Style.
I’m glad that misgendering and other LGBT issues are apparently an easy problem to dismissively handwave away in the face of bigger problems, and that a focus on that is apparently considered a problem.
#12, throwaway:
Oh no, I’m dead serious. I’ve found it to be an enlightening read more often than not, and the community regularly provided interesting supplementary links. Just curious whether the local hivemind had given up on that particular site long ago.
anbheal @ # 15 – While I agree with your spiel generally, the interwoven critiques of style and content may give me whiplash.
So far no one else has brought up Daily Kos, which I think exemplifies the internet’s trend towards wikijournalism (“Look Ma! No editors!”).
Iris VP’s question @ # 8 had to do with good sources, practically by definition a matter of editors rather than writers. Between institutional breakdowns and the current demand for Copy!Now!!!, the blue-pencil people face a critical habitat loss akin to that of the Florida panther.
But speaking of good writers, I forgot to mention in my #9 that Digby still runs her own blog, with good material not in Salon.com.
Some of those sites aren’t terrible, as long as one reads things with a bit of a skeptical eye.
Amaericannewsx carries one of my favorite bloggers, Jim Wright.
That list is a combination of the left equivalent of Faux Noise (as in, no matter how bad someone with the label of Democrat screws up, they will rationalize it) to, at worst some great commentary mixed with absolute shite.
Then again, you could say the same about patheos, so it does seem a bit hypocritical…. I like quite a few of the blogs on their atheist channel, but a lot of the shit is well, shit.