MAINSTREAM AND INDEPENDENT ON-LINE NEWS SOURCES

The fact that most major news outlets are controlled by a handful of massive, powerful companies, is becoming of growing concern in America. It is vitally important that citizens in the U.S. become more skeptical of the news that is being fed to them by these huge corporate media outlets and find alternative means of learning about what is actually happening in their country and around the world. What they find might be rather shocking in its contradiction to what they are spoon fed on a daily basis.

There was a time when the nightly news was synonymous with the words objective, impartial, fair and balanced. Reporters and newscasters saw it as their duty and badge of honor to inform the public, as factually as possible, of the happenings in the country and around the world. Today,  the major media outlets and their Talking Heads  are blindly supporting “facts” as told to them by the government, corporations and anyone else they deem worthy.

Mainstream Online News

• AOL (www.huffingtonpost.com
• CBS (www.cbsnews.com)
• Comcast (www.msnbc.com)
• Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com)
• Gannett (www.usatoday.com)
• Google (www.news.google.com)
• Microsoft (www.bing.com/news)
• National Public Radio (www.npr.org)
• New York Times (www.nytimes.com)
• News Corp (www.foxnews.com)
• Time Warner (www.cnn.com)
• Topix (www.topix.com)
• Tribune Company (www.latimes.com)
• Walt Disney Company (www.abcnews.com)
• Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com)
• Yahoo (www.news.yahoo.com)

A recent Gallup poll, taken in September of 2015, showed that 60% of Americans still do not trust the mass media to deliver the news fully, accurately and fairly.

These numbers are not so much a bleak outlook but evidence that the public is finally beginning to realize that the mainstream media cannot be trusted – a good thing and perhaps a catalyst for change. Americans need to understand what is really happening in their country and the rest of the world by reading, watching and listening to a variety of news sources, not only the mainstream media. Many times a foreign newspaper or news program will reflect a completely different perspective on the way a story in the U.S. is portrayed.

Good news sources abide by a code of ethics which should include at a minimum

• Accuracy
• Fairness
• Completeness
• Honesty
• Independence
• Impartiality
• Transparency
• Accountability
• Respect
• Excellence

Thankfully, there are a growing number of independent news sources available to anyone with access to the internet. Most state that they are “non-partisan, independent and non-profit". Some are more transparent than others; a couple go so far as to outline a code of journalistic ethics their company follows.

General News Sources:

• The Real News Network (www.therealnews.com)
• The Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com)
• Truthout (www.truth-out.org)
• Reuters (www.reuters.com)
• The Nation (www.thenation.com)
• ProPublica (www.propublica.org)
• The Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org)
• Reveal (The Center for Investigative Reporting) (www.revealnews.org)
• AllSides (www.allsides.com)
• FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) (www.fair.org)
• Who, What, Why (www.whowhatwhy.org)
• WorldNews (WN) Network (www.wn.com)
• Sputnik (www.sputniknews.com)
• Watchdog.org (www.watchdog.org)

Other News Sources:

• Arabic: Al Jazeera English (www.aljazeera.com)
• British: BBC News (www.bbc.com)
• British: The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk/)
• British: openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net)
• Asian: Asia Times (www.atimes.com)
• Canadian: Global Research (www.globalresearch.ca/)
• Russian: RT (www.rt.com)

While most of the following sources do provide some general news, their primary roles are to monitor censorship and restriction of information on specific topics:

Politics:

• PolitiFact (www.politifact.com)
• Open Secrets.org (www.opensecrets.org)
• FactCheck.org (www.factcheck.org)

 Media:

• PunditFact (www.punditfact.com)
• Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org)
• Institute for Public Accuracy(www.accuracy.org)
• FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) (www.fair.org)
• Media Channel (www.mediachannel.org)

 Corporations:

• Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) (www.prwatch.org)
• SourceWatch (www.sourcewatch.org)
• ALEX Exposed (www.alecexposed.org)
• Media Reform Coalition (www.mediareform.org.uk/)

 Climate:

• InsideClimate News (www.insideclimatenews.org)
• ALECclimatedenial.org (www.Alecclimatedenial.org)