The warning to be skeptical of mainstream media (MSM) by Chomsky and Herman (C&H) isn't in a vacuum - its criticisms are rooted in a Cold War/War on Terror-era view of the media, in which we more-or-less assume (justifiably) independent outlets are brutally snuffed out, and Capitalists wield the media like a reliable weapon, the only game in town; in conjunction with myriad other structural filters (they identify five different methods), MSM "manufactures consent". Yet today, the crippling weight of neoliberalism has alienated many people from the media, it's becoming noise to be ignored; stll many still hold MSM as a hallowed institution. This bifurcation tracks (somewhat) what Jacobin recently highlights as replacing the "communism" bogeyman with the "war on terror" to, finally, each other (ie hating Trumpers for liberals, hating the world for Trumpers) - this overall trend is more-or-less independent of the "online" component (we could see this bifurcation quite clearly even back in the early Obama presidency, before social media was anything more than something "neat" for young people to poke each other on). Yet in this context, the infusion of the online component yields a truly wild media alchemy. This is (1) because journalists have an easier time "making their voice heard" either totally independently of any outlet, or through an independent outlet (or both), rather than having to filter, and self-censor, their voice through MSM (or quit). But more so (2) because "news" (as in how one receives and interacts with the news) has now become mutable as a function of an individual's engagement, and coming back to C&H's filters, capitalists can exploit this mutability to turn a profit. For those who feel alienated from MSM (and I don't totally blame them), this empty space inherently invites a conspiratorial disposition, based on a distorted idea of "manufactured consent" - MSM is a "hoax to make sheeple", therefore the whole world must be a lie. And conspiracies, being highly mutable (and wierdly social) link into the profit operation of Big Tech companies like Facebook, resulting in an explosion of insane conspiracies among the media-alienated. Big money is certainly involved in this media-sphere as well (ie Koch funding of far-right grifters).
Consider this when you hear media-alienated people complain that "the left used to hate the MSM" (with reference to Rage Against the Machine, punk, Chomsky, etc.). These people hate MSM because they have bifurcated from it, and it is the bogeyman of their "MSM". Their criticism of MSM is NOT the criticism Chomsky made, their criticism is actually akin to how "communism" was a bogeyman (one of C&H's main filters - that bogeyman); actually it's no surprise they call everyone on the "MSM side of thing" communists with that in mind. Basically, don't fall for "enemy of my enemy is my friend". In fact, C&H's criticisms DO still apply - viewing MSM alone will "manufacture consent", but largely for reasons which can be "treated" by supplementing with more independent media (among other things).
I should note that conspiracies do exist, as in, people doing things in secret they'd rather no one know about. The problem is explaining the world all in conspiracies. A conspiracist believes that conspiracies are the reason the world is f*cked up - if we just "cleaned out the top", everything would be fine. But this is wrong (and typically leads to atrocious anti-semitism) - in reality, the world being structurally f*cked up creates the space in which conspiracies pop up (and that's assuming there even is a conspiracy - not every problem in the world has a corresponding conspiracy!).
Manufactured consent applies to both the media-alienated and the media-faithful, in different ways. For the media-alienated, manufactured consent is a more involved process - engagement with social media, private groups, and finding new ways to fearmonger about the MSM - it's more unchained than the standard structural constraints on "manufactured consent", but the idea is still there, just in a much more intensified sense. Meanwhile, the media-faithful follow a more standard route familiar from C&H. There is one ray of light here though - the internet ecosystem has allowed viable independent media to pop up, less coupled to corporate interests, less beholden to advertisement preference, more skeptical of "official sources" as truth (ie when the Pentagon claimed they killed a terrorist, but some diligent journalists (working for the NYT, no less) found out he was a humanitarian worker - and forced the Pentagon to admit it lied), more jaded to corporate flak, and more disillusioned with tribalist delusions. This is notably different than conspiratorial "jOuRnAlIsM" because (good) indie outlets either (A) make a living off of proving individual, specific claims with good evidence (and not just negative evidence of "the media covered it up") or (B) make structural criticisms, rather than alleging the whole system is a conspiracy.
Now why is this important? Because these (good) independent outlets help destabilize the manufactured consent of "MSM", while also not suggesting that MSM is on another planet. Rather, their deception is what it always has been - that of omission (ie not covering labor strikes) or giving an ideological spin that is passed off as "non-partisan" (such as talking about market solutions to problems that should obviously be fixed with public investment). But these are only problems if MSM publications are your ONLY news sources - there isn't anything dangerous about reading NYT or the Economist, per se, especially if you read other publications that help fill in the gaps (ie cover labor strikes, suggest public investment over market solutions to everything). Do you get what I'm saying? As a reader at least, "manufactured consent" is less of an issue if you have other sources to challenge the MSM narrative in a way that assumes (reasonably) we are both referencing the same basic data (no baby blood drinking devil worshippers here!), and fill its gaps in coverage. Now does this mean every MSM watcher isn't on the receiving end of manufactured consent? No - lots of people are (they still do have a capitalist hegemony, after all, and are trying their best to encroach on more open spaces like the web). But now it's far easier to escape (and well, you'll probably never totally escape, but there's a difference between drinking beer and everclear, right?). Just don't end up out the wrong escape hatch, into some god-forsaken Telegram channel spattered with anti-semitic conspiracy.
All this being said then, you should be very skeptical of "MSM skepticism" - NYT won't kill you, but maybe read some Jacobin and Who Gets the Bird alongside it (Read this site!). Remember, at the heart of C&H's criticism of MSM in Manufacturing Consent is a structural criticism, whereas as "MSM skeptics" generally criticize MSM on a conspiratorial basis. These are fundamentally different. In the former, you can still read MSM and be fine - just read other outlets to fill in the gaps, and overcome those structural issues. In the latter view, MSM is a poison meant to "blue pill" you. This is, funny enough, the opposite of the truth - conspiratorial "alternative media" is a poison, surfing on total BS, because conspiracy itself (as a primary explanation of fundamental problems) is poison. It's an attempt to get you to think "everything you know is wrong", to only trust the conspiracy-peddler. It's for this reason I exclude even ostensibly "leftist" outlets on this site, and only very reluctantly include WSWS coverage (see my Important Note about WSWS). WSWS, for example, will constantly argue that unions actually undermine the working class, that they conspire with the capitalists to do so (to be clear, this is a stupid and naive position). So if you take WSWS at face value, then ALMOST ALL labor reporting suddenly seems suspicious, right? Cause they might criticize the unions here and there, but they aren't calling them out for being class traitors! Why aren't they doing that? Are they sheeple? Or the Grayzone will publish articles about how Assad didn't actually kill civilians with poisonous chemical gas, in spite of UN inspectors proving so, that's just an MSM lie to get us to go to war (again, distorted "manufacturing consent"**)! Well, if you believe that, then can you trust the media with anything? The UN? Anyone? Do you see how conspiratorial thinking is incompatible with structural thinking? How it is poison? And at the end of the day, this kind of thing invariably leads to... anti-semitism. We saw where that goes with the Holocaust. No joke, that's actually where that goes - if you convince the masses that a small group of people is "pulling the strings" in every aspect of society, and to fix society you have to get rid of those people... oh yeah, the Holocaust happened.
**You might retort "what about the alleged WMDs in Iraq?" The difference is we never had evidence for those. Yes, we should be skeptical of American intelligence and things they say. This doesn't mean everyone is the CIA though, the UN is flawed but they aren't running a game for the CIA. Again, conspiracies are born from structural circumstances, not the other way around. Just because we spot one conspiracy (or a few) doesn't mean we should be rooting around for them everywhere.
That being said, here's some practice spotting ideology-hidden-as-non-partisanship: here is a good article to practice sniffing out BS - see here for a brief review of the BS
Use RSS (the RSS links I use for this site are here). Here I give some of the sources and the RSS links for them, just paste them into your RSS reader and you're on your way.
With MSM, be sure to read with JavaScript turned off (ie this Firefox extension), so they can't paywall you and bombard you with annoying pop-ups. Also, Wikipedia is great - it won't fill all of the gaps, but a great many of them.
(Somewhat in the order they're in on my RSS Feed) Workers World, Jacobin, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Liberation News, The Intercept, ProPublica, The Guardian, New York Times (Top Stories, US News, World News), Kaiser Health News, CounterPunch, EFF, NewsClick (India), OpenSecrets, The American Prospect, The Irrawaddy (Myanmar), Al Jazeera, PNN (Palestine), PALESTINOW (Palestine), Speak Out Now, U.S. PIRG, Salon, Vice (main and tech), FiveThirtyEight, Politico - Congress, Payday Report, Law and Crime, On Labor, Mother Jones, Prison Policy Initiative, Left Voice, In These Times, Labor - The Nation, Labor Notes, Vox, Ars Technica, Who Gets the Bird, Bellingcat, Just Security, The Hill, AP News [no RSS feed, voting rights issues], ZDNet, Wired, The Moscow Times, Al-Monitor, South China Morning Post, The Majority Report, Common Dreams, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal (World, Opinion), Washington Post (National, Opinion, World), WSWS, Middle East Monitor, Africa News, The Elephant, Africa Is A Country, Tribune
Who Gets the Bird, Jacobin, Labor Notes, Washington Post (World, National, Opinion), Wall Street Journal (US Business, World News, Opinion), New York Times (Top Stories), Just Security, Financial Times (Main and "myFT"), Democracy Now, The Intercept, The American Prospect, Al Jazeera, Law and Crime, OnLabor, Left Voice, WSWS
Also looking at quite regularly: The Guardian, Vox, Al-Monitor, Telesur, The Moscow Times, SCMP, The Economist, ProPublica, The Irrawaddy, Vice
May still look at other sources, but I have put them into tiers - ahhh, tiers!!!
Podcasts: Behind the Bastards, Popular Front, Working Class History
Warning about the WSWS: First (and I will repeat at end) you can also take some comfort that they are rated pretty well by Media Bias Fact Check, with no factual errors detected thus far. The main issue here I have is with their ideological stance, and how this colors the quality of their analysis. I will occasionally use the World Socialist Web Site, as they sometimes provide the only English coverage of certain labor news, however, I'm somewhat reluctant on this - there is a lot of sketchy stuff about them (ie see here). They have a stupidly dogmatic position against unions (in lieu of 'rank and file committees', which imo is just what a union should and CAN be); in fact, I would be distrustful of most anything they say about 'what a union did' (which is unfortunate, because unions DO sometimes let their workers down - but for WSWS, it seems that union betrayals come a dime a dozen). However, they do cover labor news in nations on occasion which I can't find elsewhere in English media (because of this, I'm even more skeptical of their coverage of unions, as it seems we are more or less relying on their translation of events). At very least, they tend to report numbers of workers striking, the basic grievances they have with their boss, and their demands, as well as ~some~ political context around it (and again, unfortunately their dogmatic stance can infect this provided "context" with a lack of nuance.) Feels like I'm reading some distorted pseudo-Trotskyist PRAVDA with a Bulgakov twist (but without Bulgakov's consent!). I do appreciate the labor here... just... sigh. Sometimes they aren't even wrong, but their dogmatism lacks nuance such that it's hard to take their opinions too seriously. Take with a huge pinch of salt. You can also take some comfort that they are rated pretty well by Media Bias Fact Check, with no factual errors detected thus far.
Note on Telesur: Telesur is a Latin American news network headquartered at Caracas, Venezuela, and primarily sponsored by Venezuela. This of course will color their editorial stance - there's obviously some issues with Venezuela, Maduro having strong authoritarian tendencies, etc. However, they do provide coverage of Latin American issues which are otherwise not covered in English. If you know of a better source(s), please contact me. I do plan to search samples of news on a Spanish-language web search just to verify the occurrence of events (it seems so far they don't make things up, just selectively cover things, a la Western MSM, although the coverage isn't terrible... probably just not very critical of Venezuela, obviously). However, from what I've seen so far, their (A) coverage and (B) editorial style are not particularly bad (although I hate their site design). Compare this to an outlet like, say, RT, which, well, fails at (A) coverage and (B) editorial style. Media Bias Fact Check has found them to be problematic (but not fake news); the "problematic" articles are pretty easy to spot in the feed though, and I try to just link to reporting of current events. Generally, I avoid for reporting on Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, although occasionally basic reporting seems fine (ie reporting a Venezuelan was arrested abroad, that kind of thing). It's pretty easy to spot the "bad" articles from Telesur, I think.
Super Paywalls: Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy
RSS (FT): https://www.ft.com/?format=rss
RSS (WSJ, World News): https://feeds.a.dj.com/rss/RSSWorldNews.xml
RSS (WSJ, Opinion): https://feeds.a.dj.com/rss/RSSOpinion.xml
Anyone who knows anything knows that Financial Times > Wall Street Journal - lol. Why does American MSM suck so much compared to British MSM??? These are sites you can't just evade the paywall on. However, FT provides famously good analysis, and WSJ is also pretty reputable. This is largely because FT evaluates the structural/power (dare I say "network") factors which contribute to the decisions being made. The articles are also not too wordy - they are very succinct - lovely! In other words, everything the NYT does wrong, FT (and the Economist, to a slightly lesser extent) does right. As a student, I am able to access FT relatively cheap (and have access to WSJ), and it seems like a shame to leave it out just because access is pay-limited. I also want to get the info out from FT to my viewers, but don't want to jeopardize the site by just posting the raw articles (lol). So I will try to give a quick blurb about what each FT article says that I post. This way you know what they are talking about in the article, and you can at least point to the article in the future. I try to keep my blurbs to be "un-biased" summaries, so you know what the FT/WSJ editorial team actually wanted to present, although when there is clearly neoliberal propaganda I will mock it or point it out (ie using quotes, or a side-note I make explicit is my point of view, and not content from the FT article). But if there is some serious divergence or comment I want to make, I will make a comment separate of the "Paywall Summary" to more clearly delineate the differences of the actual article summary and my views.
RSS (China News): https://www.scmp.com/rss/4/feed
RSS (Asia News): https://www.scmp.com/rss/4/feed
A Hong Kong based news publication, and the most prominent English-language Chinese publication. It's owned by the Alibaba group, one of the big mega-corporations in China (imagine if a frankenstein's monster of components of Amazon, Facebook, and Visa merged into an ungodly nightmare of a company, as I understand). According to Media Bias Fact Check (MBFC), they tend to report both critically, and in support of, the People's Republic of China (PRC), although be aware they have a tendency to report pro-government, and recent expression of interest by a state-owned firm Bauhinia Culture Holdings Ltd. means they may soon be more-or-less directly owned by the government. Further, MBFC reports that their editorials tend to be "pro-business", while overall having a liberal/left-leaning bias, and criticize them for keeping their sourcing closed.
RSS: https://www.workers.org/feed/
They have very nice coverage (they're at the top of my feed list, and it's not reverse alphabetical!). My main frustration with Worker's World is occasionally hinting towards a conciliatory attitude towards the PRC. This is not the focus of most of their work though, so I don't really let it get to me.
RSS: https://jacobinmag.com/feed/
Just a classic, what can I say?
RSS: https://www.democracynow.org/democracynow.rss
I really enjoy their daily headlines - good quality summary of important news.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
RSS (Updates): https://www.eff.org/rss/updates.xml
RSS (Action): https://act.eff.org/action.atom
RSS (Jobs): https://www.eff.org/about/opportunities/jobs/feed
RSS: https://khn.org/feed/
I'm honestly not sure if KHN is explicitly political or not, but either way, they give good health news, and generally seems favorable to progressive positions.
RSS: https://www.newsclick.in/taxonomy/term/india/feed
Good progressive Indian news source.
RSS: https://theintercept.com/feed/?lang=en
Just a classic, what can I say?
RSS: https://prospect.org/api/rss/content.rss
RSS: https://uspirg.org/rss.xml
Some of right-to-repair coverage from here. Also other stuff, and generally I like them. I think.
RSS: https://www.salon.com/feed/
Salon posts a lot of stuff I don't care about, but sometimes they post something worthwhile.
RSS: https://paydayreport.com/feed/
The Payday Report has A LOT of coverage of labor actions - it's a great resource for keeping up, and I reference it a lot.
RSS: https://www.counterpunch.org/feed/
RSS (Science and Tech): https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/rss.xml
RSS (World this Week): https://www.economist.com/the-world-this-week/rss.xml
For the Economist RSS feed, swap out the "science-and-technology" part with any other section of theirs; decent analysis if you have access, and even if not, the headlines help keep you up to date on a lot of things that aren't otherwised covered.
While the Economist is obviously biased towards 'neoliberal' policies and fiscal conservatism, they are also very transparent with their biases. Furthermore, the Economist is a well-resourced outlet with a good sense of the "less is more" principle in regards to article size. They write compact and succint articles (except when they don't), and their weekly politics and business news covers a lot of stuff you just don't hear about from other outlets (nothing against them, especially more independent news - Economist has a lot of resources other outlets don't have). For this kind of news, hearing 'a little bit of everything', the Economist, in my opinion, is singularly the most effective news outlet (although I would not advise them as your only outlet, beware traveler, lest you start hating leftists). Their editorials, analysis, etc. maybe you can pick and choose. Subscribing to "the world this week" is the 'best value' feed imo, as they often link to related articles there in the various blurbs, making navigation pretty easy.
RSS: https://www.liberationnews.org/feed/
RSS: https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/
Quanta provides clear and effective scientific and mathematics reporting, without cutting corners on quality. Great for the lay person trying to keep up.
RSS: https://feeds.propublica.org/propublica/main
RSS: http://opensecrets.org/news/feed
This site has lots of info on campaign donations and such, but not just a database, they do good journalism as well.
RSS: https://www.aljazeera.com/xml/rss/all.xml
Al Jazeera is largely "mainstream media", but that's fine and well if you balance it with independent analysis, and the coverage is somewhat sympathetic to those fighting the goood fight. Whatever it's sympathies, I view it as a brick in the wall of a decently-informing RSS feed. That is - by itself, it's not the most useful, but with other sources, it serves the role (from a somewhat mainstream perspective) of fairly robust worldwide updates (but maybe I'm wrong, who knows)
RSS: https://www.reddit.com/r/labor.rss
Sometimes someone in 'the community' will find a good article that slips through the cracks (ie something like CNN, MSNBC, or NYT - I don't advise those feeds not because I have reservations about them (which I often do), but because, in my experience, they are full of filler and wastes your time - let someone else find the diamond in the rough! Or you can too, if you want. Mainstream media has a real nack for reporting really dumb and irrelevant stuff, obscuring the actual good reporting).
RSS: https://www.palestinow.com/feed/
RSS: https://www.irrawaddy.com/feed
Good English-language news source for Myanmar news.
RSS: https://therevolvingdoorproject.org/feed/
RSS: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/technology-lab
Yes this feed has some "Biz and IT", it's more useful for giving news on various security risks, and analysis (and links to more analysis) of said risks.
Associated Press???
I do use AP for some things, but seeing as they have stopped doing RSS or Atom feeds, I'm slightly annoyed. But anyways, who even recommends AP? That's like recommending using salt and pepper.
By "Support" I mean sources I pay to subscribe to, or I support directly in solidarity. From what I remember, the two big ones I suggest are the Payday Report and "Who Gets the Bird". I also support Jacobin, mostly so I can use their site functionality, access some articles, etc.
..............
Evil Geniuses: Unmaking of America; A Recent History - Anderson
This book, so far, has a good detail about the rise of Reaganomics and how we got to where we're at right now. My main gripe is that the author should have been more rigid with citations/footnotes/etc (although there is quite an extensive bibliography). Sometimes it reads like the lamentations of an old traveler, which I don't mind stylistically, and the narrative has a sense of repetition, same story different characters, often times recognizable ones. 3/5 (so far), should read for information (its not dry!), citation/bibliography method seems serviceable, but still frustrating (found via interview on the Majority Report).
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary) - Eric Raymond
Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 - Thomas Kuhn
A Primer for Computational Biology - Shawn O'Neil
Data Science at the Command Line - Jeroen Janssens
Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula - Laleh Khalili
Making Mondragon - William Whyte and Kathleen Whyte
The Biostar Handbook
The New Jim Crow - Alexander
Give Us the Ballot - Berman
Labor's Untold Story - Boyer, Morais
Traitor to His Class: Roosevelt, Franklin - Brands
Freedom from Fear: American People in Depression and War (1929-1945) - Kennedy
Private Government - Elizabeth Anderson
(I think I've read more books than this in my life, who knows)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
The Copernican Revolution - Thomas Kuhn
The Sources of Social Power - Michael Mann (Vol 1, nearly)
Symbiosis in Cell Evolution - Lynn Margulis
Historical Dynamics - Peter Turchin
Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology - Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths
City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas - Roger Crowley
Persistent Homology - Tomasz Kaczynski
An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory - Michael Peskin and Daniel Schroeder
Classical Mechanics - John Taylor
Statistical and Thermal Physics: With Computer Applications - Harvey Gould and Jan Tobochnik
Introduction to Electrodynamics - David Griffiths
Electricity and Magnetism - Edward Purcell and David Morin
Quantum Mechanics: A Paradigms Approach - David McIntyre
Understanding Analysis - Stephen Abbott
Introduction to Topology - Crump Baker
Contemporary Abstract Algebra - Gallian
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos - Steven Strogatz
Acquiring Genomes - Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan
Symmetry and Collective Fluctuations in Evolutionary Games - Supriya Krishnamurthy and Eric Smith
Plato's Dialogues - Plato
Capital - Karl Marx
Principles of Neural Science - Eric Kandel, James Schwartz, Thomas Hessell, Steven Siegelbaum, and A.J. Hudspeth
In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation - Christian Henriot, Wen-hsin Yeh
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 - Christopher Clark
Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA - Richard English
Labor's Untold Story - Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais
Against Method - Paul Feyerabend
A People's History of the United States 1492-Present - Howard Zinn
A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies - Bartolome de las Casas
Mastering Regular Expressions - Jeffrey Friedl
Hackers and Painters - Paul Graham
The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents 1610 to 1791
Classical Mechanics - Herbert Goldstein
Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry - David Nelson and Michael Cox
The New Oxford Annotated Bible NRSV
Cooking for Two - America's Test Kitchen
"Fact checking" is something that liberals love to talk about and alt-righters love to hate. Obviously, factual reporting is a key part of accurate reporting. Yet it isn't the only component to accurate reporting - it's possible to arrange real existing facts in a manner to support a lie. This is why fact checking alone is insufficient to determine the accuracy of reporting, but it certainly is a big part of it (factual sourcing is required for accurate reporting). For more on this, see my post Crime Wave - The Facts are Not Wrong, the Framing is Wrong. That being said, some resources I use are Media Bias Fact Check (free) and NewsGuard (not free).