Try out https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news. I find it to be a decent evaluator of accuracy and bias.

Thanks for sharing this!

It's a useful aggregator to be sure. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve censorship.

Example:

I was trying to research the current events in Kenosha. Naturally, there's a 'diverse' set of views on the subject matter, so I tried to just watch the videos of what happened and judge for myself. When I tried to send what I found to someone else, some of the videos magically disappeared. Of course, the (very) edited versions of those videos with commentary added on top are still available.

You should set up youtube-dl on your machine so you can at least download the videos before they disappear. This tool can handle hundreds of websites and has come in handy so many times. One of the many projects I started and never finished was an auto Youtube downloader that you automatically detect when I watch a new Youtube video and archive it to a local NAS. I got tired of going back to an old bookmarked video only to find that it has been deleted either by the author or due to a copyright claim.

Something similar would happen years ago if you posted something from Wikileaks to Facebook (long before Wikileaks lost its reputation). You'd get a mysterious error after a delay, when any other site would post fine. I think HN does the same thing for different reasons -- mysterious error for suspected spam from new users or something like that.

That misinformation comes in different flavors. The NYT's reporting on "WMD" to legitimize the Iraq Invasion is a stain on their reputation, but I still consider them to be "as reliable as one could hope for".

That vs. Fox News, which was designed from the start as arm of the GOP and is a fount of intentional misinformation.

I think the path forward is curated collections of sources with trusted reviewers.

Edit: defenders can question my assertion of intention regarding Fox News, but its origin and goals are indisputable:

https://www.businessinsider.com/roger-ailes-blueprint-fox-ne...

Another stain on NYT's history is this: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/43144/did-an-un...

There's plenty more for sure :-)

I don't trust any source to be 100% accurate, but I prefer those that ostensibly try to be so.

> That vs. Fox News, which was designed from the start as arm of the GOP and is a fount of intentional misinformation.

What do you think the NYT was designed from the start as? Charitable saints interested in the truth didn't create the NYT.

The preference for fox news or nyt is a reflection on the individual rather than the merits/bias/objectivity of the news organizations. People support the news that reflect their "values" which incidentally was created by the news/media organizations themselves. It becomes a vicious, certainly not virtuous, cycle.

Again, they are far from perfect.

But I'm guessing that the depth and accuracy of the reporting as a whole is worthy of consideration when assessing the state of the world.

> The NYT's reporting on "WMD" to legitimize the Iraq Invasion is a stain on their reputation, but I still consider them to be "as reliable as one could hope for".

If the best we can hope for from major news organizations is that they'll spread misinformation to get people in favor of going to war then I'm honestly not sure what to think.

The real issue is that we shouldn't just trust any news source. It doesn't matter how many times I've correctly told you that fire is hot, you should still be skeptical when I tell you this fire is not.

It's becoming rarer and rarer nowadays but you still come across pieces of real investigative journalism where claims are backed up by evidence. For example, a great piece of reporting from the Atlantic sometime a year or two ago was on truck drivers being abused by their employer. Of course it had plenty of anonymous interviews with some of the victims, but they went beyond that. One of the claims was that the employer was changing the log of when trucks were returning at night, so the authors sat outside and recorded when the trucks were actually arriving for a few nights and compared it with the employer's statement. They included their data in an excel sheet. Could they have filled that sheet with fictional data? Sure, but no one ever published the data from their own stakeout which contradicted it.

When journalists include verifiable evidence in their stories, it takes their reporting to another level where you no longer rely on their trustworthiness and everything that doesn't looks like a tabloid in comparison. Rather than maintain those high journalistic standards, many traditional media organizations have rested on their laurels and relied on their reputation to distinguish them from their competitors whose reporting is otherwise indistinguishable. Calling their competitors fake news is just an extreme form of competing on brand awareness instead of quality.

Now obviously in the modern world with instantaneous communication a lot of stories are going to break before someone has had the time to thoroughly dot all the i's and cross all the t's - that a rumor exists is newsworthy regardless of whether the rumor is true, and the full details of many stories will not become clear until months or years after the fact. If the white house claims there are WMDs in Iraq, the NYT should tell us that the white house is claiming that. The difference between a good source and a bad one is that a good source will publish the evidence they were shown or include prominently that the white house made those claims despite offering no evidence.

Trust no one, especially those asking for blind trust.

Trust but verify :-)