>Edit: I should be clear on what I mean by news. In the traditional sense, it's reporting on facts, checking sources, and providing two sides to every story. Opinions and partisan "news" are not that.
Yeah, good luck with that. Even what appears to be purely factual reporting is subject to bias in the form of what gets factually reported and what is simply ignored. Several good examples of this were documented in "Manufacturing Consent."
Opinion and national bias often creep in to so-called factual reporting by 'expert analysis.' You really have to go to primary sources and evaluate them for yourself. Putin giving a speech is easier to evaluate than a talking head from the Brookings Institute who somehow ended up as their 'Russia Expert' because he studied abroad there 15 years ago for a semester.
You may be right that you could read the speech yourself to form an opinion, but you wouldn't know there was a speech to begin with without someone reporting it.
When was the last time you saw, on an American news outlet, a foreign spokesman or leader giving a direct statement? Other than showing them walk across the stage to shake the American president's hand or, in Saddam's case him waving a shotgun in the air on very old b-footage, I can't recall an instance of that. You only get 'expert analysis'. That's by design. It's actually possible to get a wider exposure to foreign primary sources on TikTok than CNN. This was especially true at the beginning of COVID, when the consensus in Washington was deeply confused on what the messaging should be, and now on Russia where I can see clips of Putin laying out his case with subtitles.
Yeah, good luck with that. Even what appears to be purely factual reporting is subject to bias in the form of what gets factually reported and what is simply ignored. Several good examples of this were documented in "Manufacturing Consent."
Opinion and national bias often creep in to so-called factual reporting by 'expert analysis.' You really have to go to primary sources and evaluate them for yourself. Putin giving a speech is easier to evaluate than a talking head from the Brookings Institute who somehow ended up as their 'Russia Expert' because he studied abroad there 15 years ago for a semester.