Getting Accurate Political Information?

XMorbius asks: "With the elections coming up in a few months, I (along with other Slashdot readers, I hope) want to get more informed about the candidates. But, where does one turn to get accurate (or as accurate as possible) information about them, while at the same time not having to review long logs and records of various hearings over the last decade or so? This seems like a nice compilation of information, but something tells me that it may not be very accurate. I've seen factcheck.org but I feel like there is more knowledge out there to be acquired. What does the Slashdot community recommend?"

There's No Quick Way to Get Informed

[Murdock037]

I don't think you're going to find any single source that's never been accused of bias. There's just too many viewpoints out there-- and any source that tries to go straight down the middle of the road, like CNN [cnn.com], tends to be pretty dry.

So, my solution: Read a lot. I mean, a lot, and, by exposure to many viewpoints, you'll be better off when it comes time to form your own opinions.

If you're asking about specifics, I try to take in the New York Times [nytimes.com], the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com], the Drudge Report [drudgereport.com], Slate [msn.com], Salon [salon.com], Al-Jazeera [aljazeera.net], the International Herald-Tribune [iht.com], and the Guardian [theguardian.co.uk]. Of course, all of the above have their strengths and weaknesses.

If you don't want to spend the time on all of those, though, I recommend Slate. It leans slightly left, but has good analysis from both sides of the aisle.

Read, read, read. Don't assume you're getting the whole story from a single source.

Re:They lied to me .. I do NOT live in a free coun

[RackinFrackin]

Which is exactly the point. The more expensive the oil, the more money Bush and his cronies make.

The article [worldthreats.com] that you're quoting isn't talking about the price that consumers pay for oil--it's talking about the price that the oil companies pay. If you read a bit further, you get to the part that says "oil was cheaper for US oil companies and the world as a whole under the UN's Oil-for-Food program. Now that Saddam is gone, this program no longer exists. If this war was about oil, you'd see either an extension of the program, or even sanctions lifted (in return for secret deals to use Iraq's oil). Yet, neither happened."

In other words, it now costs US oil companies more to buy oil that they can process and sell to the consumer. Sure, the oil companies will pass that excess price on to the consumer, but they won't be making more money because of it.

Re:They lied to me .. I do NOT live in a free coun

[pbox]

More expensive oil bought, means more expensive oil sold. Most likely the profit margin stayed constant in percentage points (it actually increased, see SEC reports of Shell, Chevron, etc). Even at constant it means more absolute dollars in the oil company's pocketses. It is better for them to sell it more expensive, higher oil proces also mean, that they can tap reserves, which were too expensive to tap beforehand (think arctic).

All is well, and business is booming. Especially when you can sell oil 2-3 times the going rate to the army, essentially funneling away taxpayer moey to corporate profit...

local candidates

[slothman32]

There is much talk and sites about national people like Bush and Kerry but little info is known about local ones. Where should I look to find out the issues of my local mayor or state rep? Yes it depends on the locale but or there any sites that can at least help?

Re:They lied to me .. I do NOT live in a free coun

[RackinFrackin]

especially if one of those secret deals were made.

If the Big Oil players wanted to make secret anticompetitive deals to widen their profit margins, they would not have needed a war in order to do so. I'm pretty sure that a a controversial war which puts their business practices under the microscope and could seriously affect their supply of crude is precisely what they would not want.

Re:Think for yourself

[crmartin]

If you think that The National Review is "unintelligent" but Andrew Sullivan, Slate, or The New Republic are more "intelligent" or more inherently reliable, then you're not getting it. You're a parrot.

If you think Rich Lowry, George Will, or Jonah Goldberg are more "intelligent" than Andrew Sullivan or TNR, then you're still not getting it. You're still a parrot.

If you read Daily Kos or Free Republic and think either one is particularly accurate, you're not getting it.

When you stop thinking that people on one side are fools and the other side is the only one that has morality or truth on its side, then you'll be getting it.

Re:There's No Quick Way to Get Informed

[KDan]

CNN? Straight down the middle? Don't make me laugh. CNN is well biased towards whatever the ruling party is in the States. Not as bad as, say, Fox, but still. Even BBC World is biased in the same direction (despite all that fuss about the BBC being opposed to Tony Blair. They did put out a few good unbiased documentaries which made things look bad for the Iraq "coalition" but they generally report things squarely from the side of the western world).

I don't know of any english-speaking channel which isn't biased like that. In France and Germany, Arte tends to be a little biased in the other direction. In Switzerland, the national TV is actually fairly unbiased, probably because the swiss government is neutral and it's federally funded. Even so they tend to have a little bias one way or another.

Truth is, no TV channel is "straight down the middle of the road". As you said in your post, the only way to get a decent idea of what's going on is to read many news sources. The problem is, though, even in doing so, unless you're capable of great discipline in analyzing news, you'll end up reading what you want to read and disregarding what disagrees with your world views. Perhaps over a long period of time of reading mostly from one bias you might change your view a little bit in that direction but... why the hell would you want to do that?

Daniel

Something novel - a Right-Wing site mentioned

[mbourgon]

www.freerepublic.com [freerepublic.com]

This'll probably get modded down, but consider that there are more than 2 points of view. Now, you may feel that the left is being underrepresented and all the media is pro-Bush - but the Free Republic people feel otherwise, and will show you the other side. Even if you don't like it, it's interesting to see what kind of stories are out there.

Re:They lied to me .. I do NOT live in a free coun

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The more expensive the oil, the more money Bush and his cronies make.

Oh, really? [publicintegrity.org] Check the PFDR for FY2002 (the FY03 ones aren't available yet). The President doesn't get any income from any source that's affected by the price of oil. He has some interest-bearing investments, a couple of IRA's, some real estate, a stock portfolio and a boat-load of T-bills. You might as well say that the president's wealth depends on the price of routers because he owns stock in Cisco.

I dare you to find any evidence of an actual financial incentive for the president, or anybody in the executive branch for that matter, to keep the price of oil high.

And yet, the exact same methods were used to claim the Saddam-Osama connection.

By whom? Nobody in a position of authority ever said there was a Saddam-Osama connection. There was, however, a rock-solid, no-questions, if-you-don't-see-it-you're-an-idiot connection between Saddam and Islamist terrorism. Which is why he had to go.

If you like the police state this country is in

Sigh. If this country were half the police state you accuse it of being, you'd be dragged off in chains.

Re:It turns out...

[jc42]

Yeah, Comedy Central is the best source of US political news now. And it's funny, yet. But there are two serious problems with it:

1. They only really deal with major national candidates, mostly the presidential candidates. It takes some major news for them to pay attention to state or local candidates. Understandable, because they mostly have only half an hour four evenings a week (though they upped it to an hour last week, due to the huge humor potential of the RNC).

2. Their web site sucks. Too bad; it has such potential. I've read a number of discussions of why their site works so poorly (if at all) iin most people's browsers. They only deliver in Real and WMA formats, both of which have rather flakey browser plugins. And CC's HTML is so confused that many browsers just can't decipher it sensibly, and lots of luck trying to extract the clip URLs yourself. On my Mac PB, their video clips work fine in the Real Player and Windows Media Player when I can find the URL for the clip. But they both fail almost every time when invoked from within a ComedyCentral.com web page. Even Real's fancy new browser fails on these web pages. This apparently isn't an attempt to shoot down Mac and linux viewers; Windows users also report garbled or blank videos.

OTOH, lots of political blogs are picking up on Comedy Central, and they often provide direct URLs to the videos. If you can find them, they usually work.

You might also look at theonion.com. They have some good political news. It's usually a lot more honest than the mass media, because their approach is to quote what the politicians were thinking, not what they actually said.

They recently had a headline about the New Jersey homosexual who had tearfully admitted to being the state's governor ...

WMD's found

[gatzke]

Uh, they did find WMD's in Iraq, multiple times.

We found some sarin in a roadside bomb that exploded, and some Polish troops found 15 shells with cyclosarin. Search google news for sarin to find stories on both events.

They never promised nuclear weapons, and we knew they had bio and chemical weapons, we just had to find them.

And don't give me the tired old "it is only enough to kill a few thousand people" crap. A WMD is a WMD. One is to many, and we have found around 20 shells, so far. /. bitches about "censored" news stories, but stuff that actually supports the war and kicking ass in the middle east also gets dropped or overlooked.

http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp ?I D=14638

Re:WMD's found

[Zero__Kelvin]

" Uh, they did find WMD's in Iraq, multiple times.

We found some sarin in a roadside bomb that exploded, and some Polish troops found 15 shells with cyclosarin. Search google news for sarin to find stories on both events."

Oh yeah ... I forgot about Bush's speech when he said we need to invade an entire country to find some sarin that won't kill anyone even after the bomb explodes and about 15 shells with cyclosarin. That was clearly what he meant when he said WMD. We did find exactly what Bush promised as a result of the war. We have ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia ... move along Winston ... nothing to see here ...

R U Fscking Serious????

Re:ACLU

[pauldy]

Haven't you figured out the ACLUs leadership is seriously flawed yet? Just look at how they present voting information. Instead of reporting the facts and letting you decide for yourself if you agree with the vote or not they have a nice little tally to the right of the vote. The key reads "voted for us/voted against us". This is hardly a civil rights organization they are a power hungry pac in search of as many sheep to lead as possible.

Re:WMD's found

[Dr. Manhattan]

How muc[sic] WMD must be found to convice[sic] a Bush-hating liberal? I bet you could never find enough.

That's actually sort of true. I wasn't terribly worried about Saddam having non-nuclear WMDs. Here's why [slashdot.org].

The US military also deposed one of the world's terrible dictators. That alone should have been reason enough to justify military action.

Okay, which thugocracy should we go after next? Can you even name one of the ones in the Middle East, or Africa, or even South America? Personally, I think we should have stuck to rebuilding Afghanistan from the thugocracy we'd already overthrown, but nobody even remembers them anymore.

Would you rather fight the war in NYC?

The whole point is that Saddam wasn't going to invade the US. Please, please, come up with any kind of scenario (I won't even ask you to come up with a plausible one) that has Iraqi tanks rolling down Wall Street.

And if you read enough about Iraq trying to get nuclear weapons, there is a substantial back story that may indicate they were looking into African uranium. I really don't know.

No, you really don't [msn.com].

Public Media

[quarrelinastraw]

Your best bet for a single source of non-biased news is NPR and PBS. A recent study by the non-partisan PIPA [pipa.org] found that NPR/PBS listeners/viewers had the best understanding of the situation in Iraq. By contrast, the more people watched Fox, the less they understood.

Of the mainstream news stations, Fox, and the Murdock and Scaif newspapers, are the only ones that have biases that interfere with their coverage. These stations and papers lean hard right and make a ton of money. As a result, media companies like MSNBC are starting to emulate their approach and are therefore going to lean slightly to the right. NPR and PBS, and to a lesser extent the New York Times get badmouthed by conservatives, but really don't spin their stories. There are some liberal news sources, but they tend to advertise that in their name (like, say, the Socialist Review).

Your best bet for finding out candidate information is to check out the various watch-dog sites that slashdoters have pointed out. Also, services at google and yahoo give you a pretty representative cross section of the day's news coverage.