I have nothing against Youtube videos per se, I’ve seen good independent political analysts on Youtube, and it’s still pretty good for primary source material. But for basic news coverage it’s weak, and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal.
Cable news is just trash. Informative only to the extent that it tells you a bit about why and how the public is so poorly informed.
The lack of a shared source of truth is something we haven’t talked enough about in the context of this thread, and in that spirit I will share how I shape my understanding of current events. Feel free to critique it. I’m aware of some of the ways in which it is or risks being bubbly (academy heavy, not a lot of “real america”, very customized). I’d be interested to know any other blind spots you see, and to know more about where you’re getting your news; given we disagree, I’d bet your sources would solve some of my blind spots.
For news I prefer the written word. I don’t think video is a very good medium for delivering information, because it’s slow (when I do watch, I watch at 2x), it’s at a set pace that doesn’t vary based on what’s important or what’s hard to follow, and it’s linear where learning is about building a web of connections. I watch big political events like debates and conventions and State of the Union addresses, though I’m always disappointed that they don’t use PowerPoint (#yanggang).
I favor larger institutions, because smaller shops are too unknown and too subject to the whims of their staff. But I try to get information directly from the journalists who do the reporting for those institutions and not just the articles that pass through the institutional filter. I rely a lot on Twitter as a starting point, where I follow mostly academics, journalists, specialists in various fields (tech, law, politics, philosophy) – I follow and unfollow liberally, and I use a few strategies to foster diversity of thought. Twitter gets a bad rap, and for good reason, but with diligent curation it can be a saline drip of expert opinion on everything you care about. Lots of news breaks on Twitter first (and not just because the president is making news on Twitter). The bubble is real, though, and needs to be scrupulously guarded against; I give myself a B on that.
I also check Google News regularly, but I find that less and less valuable as The Algorithm tries to guess what I want to see, and also because it includes so many shitty sources and so much junk news.
From those I get headlines, and from those I get the articles, either clicking through for good sources, or Googling to find the story in sources I trust, which include NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Financial Times, Economist, BBC, NPR, and many others. More than any one source, I trust reading the same story in multiple sources, or, if the story concerns some primary source material, reading or watching that instead. When I say I “trust” a source, it means I think they are not making up any of the facts and that I think I know what direction they’re spinning from.
For deeper analysis, I rely mostly on blogs, again mostly by academics or experts. None are particularly current events focused, but they touch on them. My Feedly (blog reader) says I follow 47 blogs, but only about 10 of those post regularly. The two that are most prolific are Marginal Revolution (written by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, economists at GMU), and the Volokh Conspiracy (a legal group blog, leans slightly right/libertarian (currently hosted at Reason, though that hasn’t always been the case), mostly law but that is often also politics, especially now). Those two are centered around econ and law, respectively, but end up being pretty generalist. The others are a bit more niche: science news, internet and tech law, SCOTUSblog, rationalism, a couple philosophers; not a lot of current events.
I do podcasts sparingly, and mostly follow the guests more than the hosts. A few I listen to regularly are Conversations with Tyler (Tyler Cowen again, probably the public intellectual who has influenced me the most in the past decade); Sam Harris (I was more into his work ~15 years ago, his current stuff is less interesting and I’ll often skip it if I don’t know the guest or care about the topic); and Joe Rogan (only because I follow the guests, and he gets everyone).
Podcasts and blogs get away from what I mean by ‘news’, but they do meaningfully influence my understanding of what happened (and not just how to put it into a narrative), so I included them.
I don’t see how this is responsive. As I understand the root of this question, I was saying that Zelensky changing his mind about the announcement once the aid was released shows that the withholding of the aid was motivating the announcement. You responded that he may have been trying to avoid getting involved in US politics, but I was skeptical because he probably knew who Biden was and that what he was being asked to do was deeply political.
Is your claim that, because it’s Giuliani asking, it might not seem political? I still think the fact that it’s Biden makes that unlikely, but even if so, wouldn’t the call in which he and Trump discuss the same investigation make clear that Trump is involved and that the political implications are probably not lost on Trump? It wasn’t Trump’s involvement, it was the release of the aid that killed the announcement.
An unnamed handful of Senators in the minority party, source = some video you don’t remember.
From a little research, this seems like it might be conflating two incidents: one from 2018, where Democratic senators wrote to the Ukraine about their cooperation in the Mueller investigation, and a meeting in September of 2019 where one Democratic Senator went to the Ukraine and discussed Rudy Giuliani’s role there. Neither appears to contain an explicit or implicit threat, and the source of allegations to the contrary appears to be Trump.
Under the law, a delay is a deferral.
I have heard the 90-day number, but I don’t know where that comes from. I see it in a more recent Ukraine spending bill, which might suggest that it was also in the bill that appropriated the that were withheld.
But given that the president withheld the aid for long enough that it literally could not be spent within the period for which it was appropriated, and had to be reappropriated as a result, it seems unlikely that Congress signed off on that.
Mate, please, just read the document. Control-F ‘impeach’.