I have recently talked to a Chinese friend of mine who started talking about how smart Trump is etc. She previously only gained her knowledge through the Chinese media and not the “western propaganda”, so it was her first exposure to the non-CCP-controlled stuff. I told her “you sound like you read FOX news”. She replied with “hahah yes, how did you know?”
This made me realize that she is very prone to getting manipulated and not doing any fact-checking. However, this situation made me reflect on my own news-sourcing skills.
How do you deal with the issue and what can I do step-by-step to verify the news that I read myself and at the same time a way that I can recommend to my Chinese friend so that she doesn’t fall for the most obvious tricks so easily?
This is splitting hairs a bit, but Ground News is more of an aggregator with useful framing than a source in and of itself.
You’re right about it being more of an aggregator. I think having a good aggregator is about as important as the sources. To be more informed, hearing the news from different perspectives is essential, I feel.
For actual sources, starting internationally is a good bet to get an outside perspective of what’s going on in your country. I feel that the BBC does a great job of covering US news for that reason. Al-Jazeera is another international source that is decent for most news in the US, but has notable biases for issues in the Middle East as far as I am aware.
For more domestic US sources, PBS and NPR are the gold standards and worth supporting since they are public broadcasting networks. The other major news networks have more notable biases since they are privately owned.
For business news, Axios, Forbes, and Yahoo Finance do a decent job.