A website that shows fact-based USA political news and history?

[HeyKitty]

DON'T YOU DARE MAKE THIS A POLITICAL MESS IN THE COMMENTS.

 

So, what I was curious on.

I was hoping there was a website with fact-backed lists of the positives/negatives/actions political figures have done while in office.  Using the broad labels (repub/democ) I find to be not sufficient for me to vote this coming election and would like to be able to see where political figures stand on certain topics rather than vote for a label.

[Andreas Lilja]

Real Clear Politics?

[Rybo]

https://ballotpedia.org/

Ballotpedia is a decent source.  It'll tell you who your representatives are, their own stated positions, and, if they have a political (i.e., voting) record, it'll give you an overview of it.  

I think once elections come around it'll also give you an idea of who's in contention for each position, but you might have to do a manual lookup based on who is running in your districts.  

[Guest]

I think c span is the government news outlet. You should be able to access the archives of discussions. You can also request any declassified documents after they're declassified. Classified information has an expiration date of 15 years from the start of the secret being top secret/classified. I don't know where you can request this though.

[captain_to_fire]

I like watching The Hill's Rising with Krystal Ball (D) and Saagar Enjeti (R). It's a commentary channel so it's biased but it's nice to hear from both sides. 

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1947492454/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_3X9.Eb7Z97KP4

[JZStudios]

There's a few sites like Politifact or whatever, but they all seem to actually be a bit less than factual or not tell the whole truth. Specifically they tend to not actually cite sources. You can use them as a starting point, and then do your own further investigations into it.

[GumblesGrambles]

The Hill has a clear left wing bias.

 

But yes what you fact check matters, if I nit pick Linus a thousand times and only bother nit picking Jayz2cents 10 times who is the bigger fibber, and there are always way to slice that fact check so it results in what you want, as you can interpret things from your chosen perspective.  Its a war of the never ending "ACKCHYUALLY". 

 

It also doesn't help that the war extends to deplatforming "authoritative" sites, excluding them from the glory of circular citation that builds up authority on places like wikipedia.

 

Data and models and academia are a dirty business. Remember the imperial college covid model everyone was citing for so long, turned out to be spagetti code and bogus assumptions, hidden behind a wall of false authority, and when it was useful for the "right thinking" people to not question it wasn't questioned and people who did were denounced and faced being censored and unplatformed and were smeared as "conspiracy" people.. as twitter did to zerohedge when they questioned whether the virus was man made.  Why question when the authority already has all the answers, even when they've been proven to be wrong time and time again.

 

There is no easy resource, especially as the major platforms have revealed singular bias, you just have to find out for yourself.

[steelo]

I don't know of a completely non-biased news source, to be honest. Of course, they all CLAIM to be 'balanced and honest' which is a complete lie.

 

I'll usually check out MSNBC or CNN and then jump to fox news to see how wildly the same story varies. This usually reveals just how biased both sides are and is sometimes quite revealing. 

 

Out of curiosity, do other countries outside of the U.S. have this dilemma when it comes to just getting honest news? It's beyond frustrating having to have to look at 5 different sources for accuracy.

[Aereldor]

Oh, they don't exist. I would just read varying opinions and make up your mind on your own. Reddit's /r/politics is strongly left-wing, thedonald.win is hardcore trump supporters. The Hill is strongly liberal, Tucker Carlson is conservative. If I'm bored/invested, I'll even look at some odball views like Libertarians, Socialists etc. just to see if I'm missing any interesting opinions or ideas.

[Statik]

This thread is going to be awesome to read in a few days time after it's impending self destruction.

[HM-2]

36 minutes ago, steelo said:

I don't know of a completely non-biased news source, to be honest.

There are some which are pretty good in terms of their factual reporting, even if their editorial contributions might have a slant on them. It also isn't really helped by the fact most people's idea of "unbiased" means "confirms my own views", which is how you end up with hilarities like Republicans consistently championing the impartiality of Fox News. It also makes me laugh to see Americans describe any mainstream media outlet operating in the country as "Left-Wing" given that the US political scale is so far out of whack that the most radical mainstream presidential candidate in recent times, Bernie Sanders, who has been frequently described by Republicans as "far-left", would be considered a centrist anywhere else in the world. 

 

PBS and Associated Press consistently do well in rankings of non-partisanship in the US media. AP in particular are a good place to go if you want literal reporting of events without much in the way of editorialisation, but they're much more generalist than the OP is really asking for.

 

 

That said, there's nothing wrong with ingesting partisan media as long as you understand the political positions of media outlets before the fact and adjust for them.

[steelo]

9 minutes ago, HM-2 said:

There are some which are pretty good in terms of their factual reporting, even if their editorial contributions might have a slant on them. It also isn't really helped by the fact most people's idea of "unbiased" means "confirms my own views", which is how you end up with hilarities like Republicans consistently championing the impartiality of Fox News. It also makes me laugh to see Americans describe any mainstream media outlet operating in the country as "Left-Wing" given that the US political scale is so far out of whack that the most radical mainstream presidential candidate in recent times, Bernie Sanders, who has been frequently described by Republicans as "far-left", would be considered a centrist anywhere else in the world. 

 

PBS and Associated Press consistently do well in rankings of non-partisanship in the US media. AP in particular are a good place to go if you want literal reporting of events without much in the way of editorialisation, but they're much more generalist than the OP is really asking for.

 

 

That said, there's nothing wrong with ingesting partisan media as long as you understand the political positions of media outlets before the fact and adjust for them.

There are multiple instances where 'left wing' sources were literally caught red-handed injecting their own brand of political 'twist' in order to sway a story for or against a side. They'll 'forget' to mention important facts, edit footage, omit parts of a video and flat out lie about what happened. Same with the right. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the incident that happened several months ago with the White students wearing MAGA hats 'harassing' Native Americans who were beating drums in their faces. What a sh!tstorm both sides of the media turned that into...

 

 Like you said though, both sides are guilty of this.

[Warin]

The best thing to do is read the same story on websites across the political spectrum.  When you look closely at them, and pick out the commonalities, you will likely be able to come up with a fairly bias free result, as long as you don't willfully engage in confirmation bias when looking at the stories and picking out only want you want to see. However, the simple truth is that we all posses unconscious biases and it makes it particularly hard.

[GumblesGrambles]

11 hours ago, HM-2 said:

PBS and Associated Press consistently do well in rankings of non-partisanship in the US media. AP in particular are a good place to go if you want literal reporting of events without much in the way of editorialisation, but they're much more generalist than the OP is really asking for.

 

 

AP maybe, PBS like NPR have been slanted for the longest time, they don't allow comments for a reason, they have plenty to fear when the narrative is so fragile.  Usually with such outlets its bias through what they focus on, and which talking heads they launder their opinions through. You don't have to lie, you bring on a chosen third party "expert" do to it for you.

[HM-2]

14 minutes ago, GumblesGrambles said:

AP maybe, PBS like NPR have been slanted for the longest time

PBS has a fairly mild centre-left bias in their editorial stance, but in terms of their factual accuracy they consistently rank amongst the best as far as mainstream US news outlets go. NPR are considerably more centre-left biased in editorial stance, but also tend to score well in factual accuracy.

[WindirBear]

Sometimes political figures actions are both negative and positive. You have to determine what you believe to be the best choice of action. This is why politics is so controversial. Always see both sides to everything and make an informed decision.

I'm learning basic economics and incorporate it with what's going on today, and it's very helpful.

As Thomas Sowell wrote

"We can't opt out of economic decisions, our only options are to be informed, uninformed, or misinformed."

[GumblesGrambles]

Just the perfect example of how brazen things can get.

https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/06/authors-of-study-on-race-and-police-killings-ask-for-its-retraction-citing-continued-misuse-in-the-media/

inconvenient citations deleted

[HM-2]

23 minutes ago, GumblesGrambles said:

Just the perfect example of how brazen things can get.

https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/06/authors-of-study-on-race-and-police-killings-ask-for-its-retraction-citing-continued-misuse-in-the-media/

inconvenient citations deleted

The bigger issue here is misuse of academic research to promote political narratives that their content or conclusions don't actually support, usually by people who have no basic grasp of the scientific method. It's this kind of misuse which creates an environment where authors end up being implicitly politicised by the views of people were who cite their work regardless of whether it's done in good faith.