Keeping up with current events as a premed

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iceman132

iceman132

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One of the areas I am quite deficient in is current events and politics. I will occasionally check out fox news or CNN but I was wondering where you get your newzzzz.
 
I'll read the NY Times and my city's paper almost daily - the latter usually takes a grand total of 15 minutes, regrettably.
 
TeeHeHe said:
Why in god's name would you suggest Reddit as a way to keep up with the news? It's a step below even Fox News in terms of confirmation bias/selective censorship.
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3 points for hyperbole.
 
Wombat Hunter said:
3 points for hyperbole.
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I don't think so. The difference between the two is that Fox reports the news but with their own extra special partisan slant. On Reddit, news stories that do not conform to the predominate worldview of the site are actively censored by down votes. You could try to argue this is somehow better in the sense that it is bottom-up censorship, but the net result is the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
 
TeeHeHe said:
I don't think so. The difference between the two is that Fox reports the news but with their own extra special partisan slant. On Reddit, news stories that do not conform to the predominate worldview of the site are actively censored by down votes. You could try to argue this is somehow better in the sense that it is bottom-up censorship, but the net result is the same.
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One is censored by Rupert Murdoch lackeys; the other by millions of average Joe's who dig teh internetz. The result is far from the same.
 
zwitterion34 said:
I was pointing out to mauberley that he was not funny when he was trying to be funny. 😎
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Eh, I'm really ignorant of these sites. :shrug: Is the huffington post legitamite or not?
 
Google News limits the bias because you get to read similar stories from different sources.
 
iceman132 said:
Eh, I'm really ignorant of these sites. :shrug: Is the huffington post legitamite or not?
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Sometimes. Just never read anything related to science.

In general, you're better off elsewhere.
 
New York Times (paper copy that the school distributes); Fivethirtyeight.com (for politics; it's now a NYT blog); BBC News; Al Jazeera English (for another perspective, not my favorite though); Popular Science (when I'm bored); CNN on the TV (when I'm home and on the couch); NPR (if I have to drive somewhere in the morning); Google News (for the random stuff that I would otherwise miss); and the Volokh Conspiracy (for the law stuff that is usually not heavily covered by the mainstream media as well as conservative/libertarian thought doesn't immediately violate Poe's law). Also a hell of a lot of other blogs.

The Huffington Post is OK, but I'd avoid it. No need to support a "news" site that gives any credibility to anti-vaccinationists.
 
For politics, subscribe to Politico's Playbook -- it's free, concise, delivered to your email inbox every morning and very easy to skim through as you're waiting in line for coffee, or something.

http://www.politico.com/playbook/
 
Ub3rmensch said:
Google News limits the bias because you get to read similar stories from different sources.
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In addition, you get access to foreign news sources AND it is available in multiple languages. Because I am multilingual, I find the quite switch between the languages wonderful (reading about the ongoing USA presidential primaries in a French newspaper is entertaining).
 
The thing I like about BBC and NPR and others is you get the news sooner than you do from the main stream media. You can sometimes get a delay of a few days between the two on certain stories. Also, as much as NPR is lambasted by conservatives for being too liberal I feel they always do a good of presenting both sides of a story without editorializing.
 
ppfizenm said:
The thing I like about BBC and NPR and others is you get the news sooner than you do from the main stream media. You can sometimes get a delay of a few days between the two on certain stories. Also, as much as NPR is lambasted by conservatives for being too liberal I feel they always do a good of presenting both sides of a story without editorializing.
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I actually think the whole 'breaking news' mindset surrounding the media is bad for it in general. How many times in recent years have the major networks been embarrassed by propagating a story before fact-checking for the sake of being the first to break the news? I'm not trying to pin this on any one news network, just the phenomenon as a whole.
 
I like the economist. Huffington is pretty opiniated with a very strong liberal bias so I would take anything they say with a rather large grain of salt.
 
The ones mentioned are really good if you are reading to stay up to date on general topics. But if you want to be aware of the latest health policy news and be prepared for your interviews, you should check out: www.kaiserhealthnews.org

 
NYTimes will send you headlines and breaking news via e-mail, so you can at least glimpse the headlines in the subject line, and open for more info. Also, getting a subscription to TIME or Newsweek isn't a bad idea; they aren't long to read but have fairly thorough coverage.
 
i get my news from Jimmy Fallon's opening jokes. zat iz all ze newz i needz.
 
lmfao
r/politics is a ridiculous circlejerk, avoid the self posts and the comments section

just open al jazeera, their reporting is surprisingly good and they have some respected journalists.

r/askscience is much better than science because of their gung ho moderation team.

r/economics is okay i guess but there's a surprisingly large population of austrians for the supposedly left leaning userbase. don't listen to them and don't get sucked into the ron paul end the fed go back to the gold standard nonsense.
 
Another one that doesn't get enough credit is the Christian Science Monitor. For people not aware, this is NOT A RELIGIOUS PAPER as the name would make you think. This is one of the most objective and balanced international papers I've ever read. (Multiple Pulitzer prizes have been received over the years)

http://www.csmonitor.com
 
kpcrew2oo2 said:
lmfao
r/politics is a ridiculous circlejerk, avoid the self posts and the comments section

just open al jazeera, their reporting is surprisingly good and they have some respected journalists.

r/askscience is much better than science because of their gung ho moderation team.

r/economics is okay i guess but there's a surprisingly large population of austrians for the supposedly left leaning userbase. don't listen to them and don't get sucked into the ron paul end the fed go back to the gold standard nonsense.
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al jazeera is pretty baller, but there are a lot of baller news orgs. I subscribe to 48 subreddits, and find that the efficiency of skimming hundreds of titles, all of which have already been vetted as interesting/newsworthy, far outweighs the cons. Plus, it makes staying informed kinda fun.
 
Alex Jones, Russia Today and Press TV.... jk
 
Al Jazeera and NYT (school distributes for free)
 
iceman132 said:
One of the areas I am quite deficient in is current events and politics. I will occasionally check out fox news or CNN but I was wondering where you get your newzzzz.
Click to expand...

Make sure you keep up with current events when you are interviewing for med. school. I was asked what was going on in the news once, and he said it was to make sure that I wasn't living in some pre-med bubble. I don't know if it's a common ?, but it's worth reading/watching the news.
 
New York Times for the news
Fox News for the laughs
 
aSagacious said:
I actually think the whole 'breaking news' mindset surrounding the media is bad for it in general. How many times in recent years have the major networks been embarrassed by propagating a story before fact-checking for the sake of being the first to break the news? I'm not trying to pin this on any one news network, just the phenomenon as a whole.
Click to expand...

I agree about the breaking news mindset but that wasn't really the type of story I was referring to. I'd describe them more as stories of at least mild importance that are choked out by the "popular news stories". They usually filter through the tv network stations a few days later. If you give NPR a shot for a week and keep watching the news like CNN regularly you would see what I mean.
 
BA11 said:
Fox doesnt censor so much as they slant, but what they do is no worse than what MSNBC does. Both are extremely biased in opposite directions
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I was using TeeHeHe's term, which I think is a fair - albeit unnecessarily inflammatory - term for describing how any given news org chooses what not to report on, or how a user-driven news aggregator site like reddit hides downvoted stories from the hot list. Even in the most egregious cases it is indirect censorship, and it's often unintentional.

Semantics aside, let's not compare Fox with other major national news networks. Their rate of hosts making factually inaccurate assertions is unparalleled.
 
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