404media, The Intercept, Status Coup News, Where’s Your Ed At, Andrew Callahan’s Channel 5, Defector, the smattering of True Crime podcasts and journals… increasingly, it feels like if you want to know what the hell is going on in the world, you have to go to some indie website or YouTube channel with six substack reporters in a trench coat.
As a consequence of the mainstream NYT / CBS / BBC going to shit, they’re the only outlets that stay current and do in depth coverage anymore. Everything else is either reactionary propaganda or AI slop.
Just being the last credible news sources standing seems to have an impact, as more people crowd in on the reliable venues for news in the void created by professionalized for-profit corporate media.
In addition to their long and ongoing history of being shit, NYT does a lot of good reporting and is also useful for understanding a specific kind of perspective. I think if you’re reading diverse sources you will inevitably have to read the NYT if for no other reason than they are breaking news regularly and occasionally covering things that aren’t really being covered elsewhere.
It’s gotten to a point where you not only have to read the entire article, as the meat of the story is hidden in like the 12th paragraph, but you also have to learn to read between the lines. Like when that story came out about marines dying in a helicopter in a part of Africa. The story wasn’t that Marines died, the story was that we had Marines in that part of the world, and then it’s on you to figure out why there are Marines there, instead of that article just explaining it to readers. And now journalists in western media also have to learn how to write between the lines so they don’t get canned by the people that own and sponsor our media.
Pretty much the only way to read news. The spin is always present, as long as you know which angles these people are pushing and what their intentions are (and which groups they don’t want to disturb) you can get to some degree of truth.
Oh for sure, they have some great reporters. They’ll never again be in my feed though. If something good comes out, someone else posts it or another pub talks about it. Not worth the anger of it all.