Non-American, English language news sources
Hey all, I've asked in the past but it feels even more pressing and I'm not sure I got all the recs, I'm looking for good news sources - newspaper, magazine, radio, etc - that provide a non-American, but preferably English language but translatable can work, perspective on their national affairs, American affairs and international affairs more broadly.
I assume Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand are among those most accessible, but I don't know which sources are more reliable. Or I can get a "news update" from RadioNZ or RTÉ but I'm not sure what programs to catch for more of international news.
I can certainly check bias on a good bias checking website but if there are particular biases I'd love a heads up on those too. For example the Guardian is generally really good except I notice they're specifically bad about trans topics.
I want to avoid tabloids, and people whose news is 3 hour daily videos. I'd like to avoid extreme bias. Free is great but I'm willing to subscribe to online access for a Canadian newspaper for example.
(I am also interested in independent writers, like Heather Cox Richardson who is a historian that does daily news analysis and writeups with context. But I'm only following a few and they're all American so happy to diversify my sources. )
Just looking to get the perspective on, well, lots of things from others countries and I have a lot of radio time I could be using for it.
I've been enjoying reading these over the years.
Japan-Based:
French Based
Middle-East/Arabia Based:
The Japan sources seem interesting. I also like Deutsche Welle, it’s a German website that offers versions in several languages, including English.
I'd also recommend the DW Documentary channel on YouTube, they cover a very wide range of topics in pretty good depth and there's new stuff posted every few days.
I totally agree, plus they also have a weekly podcast.
The few videos that I watched were very, almost unnecessarily, alarmist with little foundation. It seems like they're more worried about instilling fear than reporting the problem. The not-so-subtle message between the lines always tends to be something like: "hey look how bad immigrants are having in Europe, do yourself a favor and don't come".
Their reach is also quite impressive. I get countless messages from family and friends asking if everything is okay because of DW's videos.
I agree some of their stuff can appear that way, they're better when it comes to more science-based topics. In general the stuff I've seen from them is 90% "Look at this big problem" and 10% "Here are some people trying to fix it".
I don't think video is generally a good medium for nuance, so I don't blame them too much. I mostly use it as a jumping off point to read more about them.
This is my only source of news. Can vouch for it, it's very very good.
Their "Top stories in 90 seconds" is really good for a quick overview where they curate 3 news pieces each day. As someone that is trying to cut out news but still want a quick update on important stuff it's perfect. And then of course there are regular in depth articles and reporting.
Yes, the coverage is very detailed and well-written, I think it's an excellent website. The live TV part is also excellent, I've seen some great mini-documentaries there.
Deutsche Welle is actually a very interesting case when it comes to its organization. In germany state television (as in television that is tax funded and fully controlled by the federal government) is generally illegal. There are strict rules that govern how publicly funded television (not funded via taxes but a seperate fee with its own law) is organized to enable an independent program that is neither under the political influence of some private entity nor the control of the federal government. Deutsche Welle is the only exception to those rules. It is targeted towards an international audience and has its own law that dictates what its goal is supposed to be.
Thank you! I think I've gotten a NHK World news summary in my morning (Google Assistant facilitated) news roundup before.
I'll check these out.
IMO the State owned, Crown Corporation/Public Service Broadcasters from those countries are the most reliable:
CBC.ca, BBC.co.uk, RTE.ie, ABC.net.au, RNZ.co.nz
Yeah thanks! Do you have any programs from those broadcasters? I can listen to RTÉ but I don't know which shows to look for specifically. The hourly news updates aren't super in depth
I mostly just reads the news, so can't really help you there, unfortunately. CBC's The National is about the only news program I regularly watch on TV, besides whatever news program happens to be on BBC at the time I randomly tune in. And I almost never listen to news radio.
Fair, the deeper discussions/reporting, at least past the highlights is what I'm looking for, but I do love public radio/news of all sorts
I'm a big CBC fan. A lot of their programs are on YouTube as well for free , but the links below are to the CBC site.
Satire:
This Hour Has 22 Minutes
News commentary:
Power And Politics - panelists chat
About That with Andrew Chang - analysis about a recent news event
Informational or fun:
under the influence for advertising history and psychology
Vinyl Café personally short stories collection
Now Or Never - sort of the "Human Interest" section of newspapers
As It Happens - sort of like the above but different flavour, more current events
Quirks and Quarks - science program with interviews with actual experts
Dragon's Den - the gentler version of Shark Tank. Ignore Kevin O'Leary he's an American turd.
Honourable mention:
Indigenous Canadians programming like Bones of Crows
Unreserved
Thank you. That's a comprehensive list to try!
Also, please do not pass us Kevin O'Leary. We have enough shithead businessmen, thank you.
To add to this lovely list of CBC programs. Most of these shows/publications are analysis and commentary, but with multiple flavours. Much of what's produced up here these days rides the centre line, though.
CBC Ideas - a long form radio show that explores compelling ideas, research and social topics. My fave
Frontburner and The Decibel are Canada's premiere The Daily style newscasts.
It's seen better days, but Canadaland has a rich history of investigative journalism, commentary and breaking big stories.
An elder statesman of journalism in a way - the Paul Wells substack reminds me of the tone taken with The Atlantic.
The Tyee is a left learning publication focusing on the west coast and Prairies
The Line is right of centre commentary that, If you can handle Jen's personality at times, is a great no-BS take on the Canadian political moment
The Globe and Mail has great podcasts all around.
And no shade to throw on the previous list, but (IMO) Vinyl Cafe and As it Happens are a bit of a snorefest.
Ty! It's worth checking stuff out, sometimes I like a dull background noise sort of thing.
Can I recommend the Elbows Up podcast in exchange? It was enjoyable
Sure! I'm happy to expand my ever growing list of listening for dull work tasks.
O'Leary is already basically an American at this point. He spends far more time there, doing business and acting as a talking head on your news channels, than he spends here in Canada. So he's all yours. And we don't want him back, either. Sorry, but thanks for taking him off our hands, it's appreciated.
No no no, we're actually doing a whole no immigration thing right now and while I don't love that if you'd like to take a particular... Orange... Individual .. or maybe an X obsessed South African...
We could negotiate.
Nice try, but O'Leary is actually already a US citizen, so no immigration required; He already has. ;)
And uh.... no thanks. I think we'll pass on taking the other two. Unless (totally unrelated, we promise!) you're willing to revoke the The Hague Invasion Act, that is. :P
What I'm willing to do is very different than my ability to achieve it. ¯\_(⊙_ʖ⊙)_/¯
I thought we were speaking as official diplomatic envoys of our respective countries with carte blanche to negotiate deals! Are you telling me you're not? How dare you mislead me so! :P
Unfortunately I'd need to be more than a diplomatic envoy, superhero might be the required level
Too late no takesy-backsies, sorry!
Also we'll try to give you Pierre Poilievre too, and rural Alberta if they want to go. Trade you California tho. :p in all honesty though maybe Canada US should do a free trade period where all the people who wants to go to the other country get to go, and y'all trade homes.
Ok look, first off you don't want California. Let's talk Illinois.
If I get swapped in the trade we can work with this but no, we do not need any extra PP in this house 😭
That's true, y'all full to the brim with a certain type....
With any luck, they will collectively decide to go to space by choice , and not come back 🤫
On TV, RTE's Six One is the flagship daily news programme that will cover most of the day's events. Upfront with Katie Hannon or The Week in Politics are weekly shows with more opinions and commentary about what's going on in the world. Virgin Media's The Tonight Show is similar enough. They're all more with an Irish slant, but sometimes cover international events.
Claire Byrne does a radio show which should cover current affairs - she used to have a TV show covering the same. Morning Ireland on RTE Radio One would also be news and current affairs for the most part.
Newstalk is another Irish radio station with Pat Kenny and Sean Moncrieff being the ones I'd recognise as more current affairs though I don't listen to that station myself. It can be quite biased with its commentary that I never particularly liked.
Overall, I find the news section on the RTE website mostly unbiased, though they get a lot of their international coverage from news agencies like PA or AFP.
Thanks!
I do like listening to Irish news when I can
Just saw that RTE have quite a few podcast streams available too. I subbed to a few in the past. I've always found the reporting of RTE to be quite thorough. They do have their problems as an organisation (mostly the salaries paid to the entertainment "stars") but the news, current affairs and documentaries they put out are high quality and very accessible. They never go for the sensationalist angle in my view anyway.
Yeah I'll have to go through and look again but that's why recommendations are so helpful
From the BBC, The World Service is world news and current affairs radio from a British perspective.
I do hear that on my local NPR station. I don't usually get a ton more than the headlines but that may be because of the length of my drives not the BBC
I haven't been a regular reader in quite some years, so I don't know if it's still the case, but at least back in the day, The Economist was excellent for global news. They cover a lot of stuff that you would never find in any other English language media if you weren't specifically searching for it. For example, reporting on issues in Africa that aren't the same ~5 ongoing conflicts or poverty, which don't get me wrong are important, but it's a whole ass continent that you rarely hear anything about except the same handful of stories about human misery. And they're also good with smaller countries in Europe and Asia that rarely get much attention in US media.
Their editorial stance is very much in favor of free trade and economic liberalism, but not really right-leaning on social issues, and most independent sources regard them as being reputable and not very biased.
News Minimalist and a daily read of the Economist front page are my go-tos, with a regular check in to CBC (my local news) as well. As you say, the Economist is both broad and deep; I like it a lot.
Financial Times is British and has a very global focus.
Their deep dives are always loaded with informative data and charts which I greatly appreciate! They're definitely one of the most authoritative newspapers.
But very expensive to access!
i would also add to this that they tend to mostly ignore culture war stuff or at least rage bait takes on it, so i tend to use it as a relatively 'safe-to-read'.
https://hongkongfp.com/ - English news reporting of world events
Edit: https://greenbean.media/en/ has a lot of videos with English subs. They're less news and more "how is the Diaspora doing around the world and what's happening at their new home countries?
South China Morning Post has their own "interesting" biases and like all sources, I would always check with additional sources
Interesting how?
SCMP used to be way up there for journalistic integrity, along with Ming Pao. They got a little too dependent on major money, but the journalists themselves tried to do good work. And then in recent years they got acquired by Alibaba which is a mainland Chinese business, so.... They're still useful as a non direct State mouthpiece, their news staff are trying, their editors have whips behind them, and overall they're an interesting mix for me to read as a counterbalance to my usually fix of very far democratic sources. Their opinion columns are a dumpster fire imo
Don’t forget that many browsers have language translation built in. You can likely browse foreign non-English news articles and have it translated to English.
If you want foreign opinions not targeted towards English speakers, translating is probably the best option. The fact that a foreign outlet publishes English language articles suggests that there may have some inherent bias in their message. Nothing necessarily nefarious, but probably not targeted towards their local audience.
This is true but translated articles are not always accurate either, I use translate frequently even here when some folks are sharing an article in their language but struggling to find the English word that fits I'll go play with a few translation options and try to help work it out.
I have a Duolingo amount of French so I could potentially read French articles and translate what I don't grasp but it'll depend on the quality of it.
That's sort of why I thought the English speaking countries would have the most accessible non-American (aka foreign but that is relative) but still English language sources. My goal is getting non-American viewpoints not just on the US but also on other world politics/news/etc
in addition to ft.com i commented on elsewhere on this thread, https://novaramedia.com/ is good and have podcasts/videos. they would be labelled by others as having a 'left bias'. i recommend not reading or supporting the guardian (uk) in any way (and they suck on more than just trans issues). i would also not trust the bbc for basically anything other than what the british government thinks.
also it is american but i am so impressed by the baffler that i order it in paper form - it has a relatively global focus. i feel like i learn more about what is going on in the world from that than anything else i read, probably.
OH and also, https://theconversation.com/uk , news written by experts in the relevant fields, is a must.
Can you share the Guardian and the BBC concerns? Thanks for the other recs
the BBC is the british state media. they have a charter that indicates they must be impartial. in practice, however, this is not the case. they engage heavily in selective reporting to quietly enact editorial lines. they are also frequently forced to withhold information by legal injunctions in the uk, which they are not even allowed to acknowledge (though this isn't a specific criticism of the bbc, all news outlets in the uk are bound by this). soft pressure on editorial decisions is also exerted by the government, either directly or via political partisans installed in leadership positions. yet softer, the majority of people in high places did the same PPE etc courses at oxbridge as those in government, and this consists the infamous old boys club.
on specialist issues particularly, their journalists tend to have a very poor understanding and repeat untruths and misconceptions. i have observed this on topics i am an expert in, and therefore don't trust them on anything else specialist. i would say that this problem is common across journalism, though. what makes it especially damaging is the perception of the bbc as a source that can be trusted.
in addition, i also think that their enactment of 'unbiased' reporting repeatedly transforms what are essentially 'public education' or 'news' problems into perpetuation of fringe, extremist, and untrue beliefs on important topics, causing them to enter the mainstream, legitimised by a supposedly unbiased source. this happens again and again, the premium case being brexit, of course.
the above issues are relatively well documented, but people disagree a lot about the extent of the capture and its effects. it is my opinion that these failures cause them to bear a large degree of responsibility for the rapid decline of the uk in the past ten years or so. on the other hand, they are not that bad compared to most other british media outlets. much of the problem comes from the perception that they are fair and unbiased and the relatively quiet way they editorialise. my opinion would be considered quite extreme across the british public.
my recommendation re the guardian is primarily informed by trans stuff. i am personally not willing to forgive or look past that. otherwise, my (very much) opinion from their writing is that, the paper panders to people who are ultimately conservative, but want to feel better about it, don't want the status quo to change at all, don't want to have to take a stand against any of the evil going on, but want to be seen as caring about it. the writing often bends backwards to support this kind of thinking, where disagreements with conservative understandings of that which occurs are often aesthetic rather than substantial. this is, for me, incredibly frustrating to experience. and this wouldn't be /quite/ such a big problem other than, in a parallel to the bbc situation, its perception as the leftie newspaper frequently leads to uncritical introduction of very stupid and evil opinions, which are thereby legitimised mainstream as common sense agreement 'across the aisle'
I appreciate it, I also have the same concerns about trans issues with the Guardian and wouldn't pay them for that reason but I didn't have much of a sense of them otherwise. I'll read the NYT for example but I won't pay for them anymore for similar reasons.
What you're saying about the BBC makes sense, I do agree that there's an issue of journalists understanding areas of expertise across the field but I appreciate that the BBC is held up as a standard that it sounds like it isn't meeting.
For me my goal right now isn't only to get an unbiased perspective but to see the US or global issues from an external angle, so sometimes that bias may be helpful for that goal but I'll try to keep those criticisms in mind.
I've liked a lot of British podcasts, any radio/podcast suggestions that are less on the "both sides and keep the class system intact" from that angle? (I wonder if there's a Scottish option that is less deferential to the government beyond legal requirements...)
Yle, the Finnish National broadcasting company offers news, both domestic and foreign, in English.
I feel they are largely un-biased in the news reporting (opinion pieces might vary), but they also have been accused of being left-leaning by the far-right politicians.
That's a new one for me, ty!