I get my news on webdip... its neither particularly accurate nor unbiased :P. But I find it acts as a good filter. I only hear about the really big stuff or the really funny/crazy stuff.

Al Jazeera. People associate it with Al Qaida and other terrorists simply because the name is Arabic and sounds similar to an English speaker (though it is very different in Arabic). It is actually a fabulous, fact-based source which typically restricts one-sided reporting to the editorial sections.

Which way do you think the BBC is biased, Jamie?

I like The Atlantic and Christian Science Monitor.

All anyone needs is France 24. None of the nonsense of American cable sources, none of the creepy authoritarian state support of Al Jazeera and Russia Today. All it is is news.

Understanding the spectrum of the bias is also important. Google news consolidates the news by story and lumps the bias all together.

@ Invictus: France 24 is wholly owned by the French state. How can you say it doesn't involve "state support" ?

Fox News.

Tastytrade.com for all relevant financial news.

Draugnar.com

@ Pete U: "Which way do you think the BBC is biased, Jamie?"

A number of recent issues give me specific concern, including:

- Significant pro-union bias around the recent Scottish independence referendum.

- Bias against political groups which are not part of the established political class - for example, running mile-high headlines whenever Nigel Farage blows his nose, whilst at the same time trying to convince BBC viewers / readers that the Green Party does not exist.

I second bo_sox. al-Jazeera is an outstanding news source. Hell, even their left-wing op-eds are well-written. Also, I like how they clearly label opinion pieces. Their non-opinion pieces seem pretty unbiased, too.

Furthermore, anyone who associates al-Jazeera with terrorists is full of shit. Their unflattering portrait of ISIS/ISIL/IS is proof that they have a centrist stance.

Jamiet99uk: Being owned by the state doesn't have to mean that much. RTVE/TVE in Spain is also owned by the state, but it's coverage is pretty good, especially when it comes to international news. PBS and NPR are also owned by the state in the U. S., but their media swing isn't nearly as bad as the major media outlets. You shouldn't confuse Continental European state broadcasting corporations with something like Voice of America or CCTV. (Incidentally, CCTV isn't bad, though rather dull, if you ignore Chinese news)

I've used France 24 very little in the past, but I never had a problem with their news. They do have the advantage of broadcasting in English, something TVE doesn't do. And yes, in recent years BBC has made me gag almost as much as major media stations in the States do. Deutsche Welle is another state broadcaster broadcasting in English which is pretty good.

Depending on what you're looking for, going straight to Reuters, AP, AFP or EFE can be very refreshing. Most global news comes from those four sources, so turning to them instead of the sources which simply regurgitate their original work makes sense.

When I was younger I used FSTV and Link TV, which broadcast on satellite. During the Bush dark ages they rebroadcasted independent news programs like Democracy Now! or Liberty News TV, rebroadcasted international news networks and aired revealing documentaries. Liberty News is now defunct (and its name taken up by far right news sources), but the others are still around. Their best program, MOSAIC: World News from the Middle East, of Link TV, is no longer running.

NYTimes and NPR. Grantland and The Classical for sports news, the Atlantic for commentary.

@Jamie - thought the BBC were pretty balanced on the indy ref personally, but then both sides facts and figures were open to challenge.

And, as the Kippers claim the BBC is biased against them (and they have the third most support according to opinion polls), it seems that all they are doing is reporting the news.

The BBC isn't perfect, and a range of sources is always good, but the fact it gets attacked from pretty much every quarter would suggest it is doing something right. In fact, i would suggest it goes too far to be fair and balanced sometimes

http://www.theguardian.com but then I've always read the paper version because a left of centre slant is to my taste. Trouble is ... the song Crazy Miranda (Jefferson Airplane) sums it up really - you have to read anything with a huge dose of scepticism.
"Crazy Miranda
Lives on propaganda she believes anything she reads
It could be one side or the other
Free Press or Time Life covers
Follows newsprint anywhere it leads ...."

So uou can read a Russian view of the Ukraine situation here perhaps http://sputniknews.com/ for example and try to balance it with the (also biased) western view.

@ Pete U: With reference to your point about opinion polls, recent opinion polls also put the Greens ahead of the Lib Dems. Would you say this is reflected by recent BBC political coverage? I wouldn't.

We could kill two birds with one stone here. What should happen is that a Green, UKIP, BNP Loony etc should be on standby whenever a politician is questioned. When they dodge the question, the interviewer should just move to the second person on the list. The main interviewee would hate giving up airtime so much that they might actually answer a question.

If Bo and Gunfighter agree, it has to be true.

NPR is also excellent but I don't know how much of it you get in the Uk.

Any news source is going to have at least some bias. The best thing to do is read multiple sources....WHATTT

I've honestly never read anything from Al Jazeera. I like NPR for some things, but I've definitely heard stuff from them that seems to lean left a bit.

You guys shouldn't get too caught up with the useless concept of 'bias'. The key question is not the political opinions of the reporters (which shouldn't matter to anyone), but the quality and comprehensiveness of the news. Mainstream media outlets in the States, the BBC and even the New York Times leave out a ton of key information from their reporting.

Jamiet99uk: As far as news aggregators go, Google News and ConflictMap.org can be very useful. Google News lets you choose which country it will look for news sources in, which is helpful when you don't know what local news sources you are looking for or just want to see the slant a story is given in a particular country. ConflictMap.org doesn't look like it's even mantained, but the feeds it has on obscure and 'headline news' wars are a gold mine of up-to-date information.

The concept of 'bias' is worth considering. It does matter when editors let the biases of their reporters into their news. Talking points which are unchallenged are not news.

As the saying goes, "News is something someone else doesn't want you to hear. Everything else is advertising."

JECE: what key information does the New York Times leave out?

I like the New York Times for news and the New Yorker for commentary. ESPN, SI.com and Grantland are all good for sports. And the CBC, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star for Canadian stuff.

Frank: It really depends on the article. They're not nearly as bad at that as the mainstream TV media outlets in the country.

Jeff Kuta: Uh, with major media outlets it's not the reporters but pressure from above that twists the news stories. But what do you mean by 'bias'?

@JECE: Seems to me you were talking about bias being "the political opinions of the reporters" which you then dismissed. Many readers do take what is spoon fed them and repeat it as truth.

You do mention what is left out of the news, but it is more difficult to correctly infer whether a news item has been actively or passively ignored.

...and therefore assign bias to that news outlet for such omission.

Jeff Kuta: I don't think 'bias' exists outside statistics, so my definition is just an approximation of what people mean when they dismiss a news source as 'biased'.

I guess if you have Fox News scale systematic omissions it would technically be a form of statistical bias. But with most news outlets I wouldn't use that term. I don't think it's useful or descriptive.

The Wall Street Journal because Fox lets it be fair and balanced. :)

The local newspaper is for the ads, weather, police speed trap radar locations, and unintentional humor. Former vice president Dan Quayle's family own it so I knew its bias.

"France 24 is wholly owned by the French state. How can you say it doesn't involve "state support" ?"

How cute of you not to include my full quote. It's like you're just completely I referred to "authoritarian state support." Russia and Qatar, authoritarian states, created their news stations as propaganda horns for their corrupt, illiberal government.

The pro-French propaganda on France 24, on the other hand, goes no further than support for the EU farm subsidies that keep their inefficient farmers in business. Compared with garbage from cable news and conspiracy-theorist enabling, knee-jerk anti-West babble from the likes of Russia Today, France 24 is an island of reliable, informative content.

"It's like you're just completely are not interested in addressing the point I clearly was making."

Is what it should say someplace above.

More or less...

Economist, AFP, RFI, and twitter/Facebook/reddit. The French sources have far superior africa reporting. I don't know about unbiased, pretty much all news media are "establishment shills" or whatever.

Every news outlet is biased. Hell, every person is biased at some level.
Comprehensive understanding can only come from casting your net as wide as you can and then assimilating information based on your own personal (and biased) analysis.
Refer to some high quality journals regularly - FP, Foreign Affairs, Economist etc. NYT, AlJazeera, FinTimes, Reuters etc for newspapers with global reach.
Follow individual journalists and established academics to stay in touch with multi-source news that they will keep tweeting and discussing regularly. Following the right people on Twitter can be a brilliant source of news.
Also follow country specific newspapers to get alternate viewpoints - GlobalTimes for China, Haaretz for Israel etc etc.

I get most of my news from twitter. It's easy to follow a bunch of different sources and it's hard to miss any facts that come out about an issue.

When, in July 2013, the BBC, for a continuous period of 48 hours, covered nothing but the birth of a certain George Wales, I took the (for me) unusual step of writing a letter of complaint. I can't have been the only complainant, because, soon afterwards, a representative of 'Republic' was given some token airtime.
In the meantime, I turned to Al Jazeera, which provided serious, thoughtful coverage of world events and also Russia Today, which was less impressive (but at least wasn't consumed with royalism).
More generally, I despair of the BBC's treatment of the 'home colonies' (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland).
I'm with you on this one, Jamie.