A Citizen's Guide to Staying Informed on the Open Internet

I am often asked by students or young professionals in the international security field about the Open Source sites--or, God forbid, site, singular--that I consider to offer the most objective reporting on major issues and events. Often enough that I've developed a pretty standard response...and often enough that I've finally decided it's worth offering here--especially in an era when terms like "post-truth," "alternative facts," "fake news," and "disinformation" have entered the everyday lexicon.

The first thing I tell them is that this is the wrong question. It's a natural one, when spinmeisters of every variety like to deride any source that disagrees with them, as "not objective," or "biased"--but the truth is, every source is biased. That's the bad news. The good news is that that does not mean what the worst offenders would like you to think it does--i.e., that all sources are equal because "truth" either doesn't exist, is completely relative, or simply cannot be determined, for any complex, real-world issue. So the right question is something more like, "How do you pick the sources you use to sort through all the bias and iterate in toward where the truth most probably lies?"

To paraphrase Mulder and Scully, "the truth is out there." And it's not that difficult to find.

Don't get me wrong: you'll have to do a little work...and that's exactly why so many citizens--the Constitutional sovereign in a democracy--walk into the voting booth every few years and make the decisions that drive our policy & influence our lives based on understandings that are flat-out wrong, because the sources that swirl around them in their daily routines contain systematic biases--which, among other problems, can feed what's called the availability heuristic. But it's not rocket science, and it doesn't take more time than a typical, hard-working citizen with a job has. So how can we overcome these obstacles, and grow as informed citizens who understand (1) the range of views on the important issues in our lives and (2) the biases that drive differences in perception of them--and what is best to do about them?

Well, the first step is to hone our "metacognitive" or critical thinking skills. That's a whole topic in itself, so for here let's summarize it as trying to make ourselves more consciously aware of our assumptions (information we require to reach a conclusion...for which facts are unavailable, and about which we therefore must substitute an opinion or make a guess) and biases, each time we confront an issue.

But after that--and in part to help us address those very issues--we need to monitor a range of news sources. As I've mentioned, every one by definition exhibits some systematic biases, just because there are human beings at the other end. So you want to compose your own set of sources that covers a spectrum of competing biases, so you can use the different ways they report a given story (and the different stories they report & prioritize) to highlight where biases are in play, and help you triangulate on where "truth" is.

For example, the ones I most commonly use are:

• NYTimes (U.S. perspective, left-leaning, for-profit)
• WaPo (U.S. perspective, left-leaning, for-profit)
• WSJ (U.S. perspective, right-leaning, for-profit)
• Fox News (U.S. perspective, right-leaning, for-profit)
• NPR (U.S. perspective, left-leaning, not-for-profit)
• BBC (Anglosphere perspective, not-for-profit)
• France24 (French/European perspective, not-for-profit)
• Al Jazeera (Arab perspective, for-profit)
• Asia Times (Pan-Asian perspective, for-profit)

Again, these are just the ones I happen to find most useful to routinely monitor. Feel free to add or subtract others to better fit your own needs.

Additionally, I find significant value in using News360 -- a device-agnostic (iOS/Android) mobile news aggregator built specifically on the triangulation principle. It's organized around stories, with one source selected as the default, but all others reporting on a given story menu-selectable, so that you can directly compare--say--how a story about the Congressional investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election is being covered by Breitbart, The National Enquirer, RT, and Infowars.com, vs. Buzzfeed, Slate, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic, vs. Foreign Policy, The Economist, RUSI, and IISS, vs. WaPo, Fox, BBC, and Al Jazeera.

NOTE: this is also how I double-check "Mainstream Media" vs. "Pop PoliSci" vs. Quasi-academic, vs. "independent Journalism" of various stripes. There are way too many professional, niche/specialized sources to track them all, all the time--plus, they're specialized, and thus any given one won't report on many of the stories I need to follow--and I don't see any general value in monitoring sites that are explicitly propaganda, fake news, or one cut above "some guy with a blog." But I do recognize that "mainstream" or "professional" is a bias too, and sometimes a "boutique" source will be more nimble or less paranoid about "getting it wrong" or "what might turn off the customer," and scoop all the big names.

So that's kind of my generalized take on Open Sources. If you're faculty or a registered student at any accredited college or university--or if you're gainfully employed in some capacity that generates enough revenue to justify paying for a subscription--I would of course also suggest the big databases like Lexis/Nexis, EBSCO, ProQuest, etc. to cover legal & scholarly sources (peer-reviewed research) on historical or long-term issues in your areas of interest.

And if you have a little time, brush up on those critical thinking skills!