Come contribute your analysis in the comments, vibes based or otherwise.

I think sometimes it depends on the topic.

Reuters is good at getting some key points and missing full state department spin, but the problem is that they have a reputation as non-biased, and that reputation means they/you do not bother to inspect their own ideology. In other mainstream media, it's easy to spot the political spin and bias if you know what you're looking for, but Reuters is much more clandestine, and possibly unintentionally so.

I imagine it to be ran by 'well meaning' liberals who have a level of journalistic integrity, that is born from 'do the right thing in the name of democracy' rather than from a serious political education.

So they thoroughly explore 'both sides' a lot, while presenting all of their information with a very 'objective' feeling register of language, in the process omitting important facts/framings that they would deem to be inducing a level of political bias.

That said, I will say they're not otherwise too worthy of my ire in comparison to other major media organisations.

Weirdly, I was researching Venezuela recently for a stageplay I'm writing, and Bloomberg gave surprisingly good coverage of events I didn't expect them to bother with. You wouldn't be able to form a meaningful analysis of venezuela based on their coverage alone, but I was still quite shocked that I found bits of their coverage to be pretty OK, and sometimes divergent from the usual state department shit that CNN or even The Guardian would put out. Very curious.

  • memory_adept [he/him]
    ·
    7 months ago

    also spin is way less important than omission. if i could level a single criticism against western leftists and really have it be absorbed, it would be to spend less energy on media criticism of spin (or more accurately fandom of media critics who traipse after the NYT, Reuters, BBC, Guardian, France24, etc) and calling out internal inconsistencies and more time getting around the omissions completely

    • FunkyStuff [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      The most important bit of wisdom I've gotten from citations-needed is that the basic unit of propaganda is emphasis, not lies. And emphasis goes both ways; you amp it up beyond emphasis by not even acknowledging the things you really don't wish to emphasize.

      • RION [she/her]
        ·
        7 months ago

        something something media isn't good at telling you what to think, it's good at telling you what to think about parenti

    • MaoTheLawn [any, any]
      hexagon
      ·
      7 months ago

      Oh, for sure. I guess I hadn't considered spin as a precise term - I was including omission in it. Yes, omission is by far the worst offender.