"facts", when presented individually, can create almost any impression the fact presenter wants to create. and that's what we've been seeing so much of - people looking at "facts" outside of larger contexts, and (intentionally or not) drawing wrong conclusions.
You are correct there. It is easy to take two facts and extrapolate almost anything you want. I think the issue is that in a lot of modern news the facts are lost in the opinions and rhetoric and extrapolation to the party line. It is better to have lists of facts than lists of opinions; and even better to have a coherent collection of facts that all corroborate one another. It is good to have a variety of primary sources and hard data over a long time period. Too often the news just quotes a death figure without giving you context of how many people usually die in a year, or other information; presumably that data exists. It would be much better to have death rates for each year over the last hundred years, then be able to compare.
I had months of people telling me the 'fact' that "Fauci said not to wear a mask! That's a fact! Go read it here!"
When presented with "well, he also later said 'wear a mask' - which is also a fact"... I would get "fake news" or "he flip flops and therefore can't be trusted". When pointed out they were still 'trusting' the "don't wear a mask" fact... things usually ended there, with some profanity thrown my way.
When more information was presented, it was almost always countered with "that's just your opinion". Or... "I don't trust CNN", etc. At some point a switch flips with many people and "facts" only count when they match your internal belief system.
Al Jazeera English (can’t speak to the other streams) has 30-60 minute blocks of actual news throughout the day. Another benefit is that they have a more global perspective so those news blocks are a lot more likely to be covering the unrest in Darfur than a human interest story about a woman in Idaho who just ate her 10000th Big Mac
PBS News Hour? There isn’t enough of National or Global importance to fill a 24/7 broadcast so any channel that needs to fill that amount of time is doomed to have poor quality.
They’ll repeat, but it’s not clear why that is poor quality. It’s not a bad thing that there’s not true, honest to goodness, novel news at all hours of the day.
I wish more people would post primary sources & hard data. A lot of people will disagree with the content, but "The Last American Vagabond"[1] does a good job of presenting primary sources (usually medical journals/studies, gov't press releases, interviews, CDC, WHO etc.); includes links to all of them in all show notes so you can look through all of it. The main point here is that including primary sources is important, and I don't see most people doing that. I wish more news sources would include the primary sources and more hard data to support their position.
It's just as misleading to string together dozens of "sources" in an article to prop up a narrative. It appears to me that the website you've linked is just playing on peoples paranoia, a la YouTube "news" channels. If the actual content has to chase the dramatic headline the entire time, you can be sure that it's a whole lot of BS.
But even if news LOOKS like they stick to the facts, you should still look at them critically and get your news from multiple sources; they can still influence your opinion simply by omission or by emphasis (random example: put a muslim terrorist attack front and center, put a nazi terrorist attack in a byline or not publish it at all).
The news items themselves can be presented neutrally, but what news to present and how still matters.
Simple, do what they are doing with the Nashville bombing and the Las Vegas shooting before that. Don’t bother investigating any relatives, family members, or neighbors. Do a few fluff interviews with the FBI or the police and put it somewhere at the bottom of the page.
