Something that shows the extent to which they are in sync and aligned, maybe even how their narratives co-develop in terms of timing
Might not be exactly what you have in mind, but I have a separate browser that has set as Home the following state-owned or aligned news sources from around the world to check different perspectives on current headlines:
https://www.bbc.com/ - Britain
https://www.abc.net.au/news - Australia
https://english.news.cn/ - China
https://www.foxnews.com/ - US Right-wing
https://edition.cnn.com/ - US Left-wing
https://www.rt.com/ - Russia
https://english.alarabiya.net/ - Saudi Arabia
https://www.dw.com/en/top-stories/s-9097 - Germany
https://www.batimes.com.ar/ - Argentina
https://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/ - South Africa
https://ddnews.gov.in/en/ - India
https://www.cbc.ca/news - Canada
https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en - Brazil
https://www.straitstimes.com/global - Singapore
https://news.un.org/en/ - United Nations
https://www.sbs.com.au/news - Australia, but more multicultural perspective
I’d rather see something similar to Ground News that compares media narratives to the actual facts. And especially one that goes back and examines which publications were shown to be more aligned with reality retroactively.
But I thought the entire basis for people wanting a product like ground news was that it can be difficult to get facts or to have a firm grasp of reality where it pertains to the types of events we’d call “news” because the only way in which people other than active participants in the events or journalists, can gather such facts is through media. Since one doesn’t reliably know what facts have been omitted or distorted when consuming media, the main way to get another perspective and hear different narratives, framings and details of the story are through any media other than the one you’re consuming. This can be misleading because there is a lot of it and in addition to the possibility of outright materially incorrect facts, one could also be gathering the facts within the framework of a perspective that serves agendas or corporate necessities or biases inherent to a given publication. With a lot of different media options including many one mightn’t even know about and with opacity surrounding what media is subject to what biases and agendas among other influences the process of comparison and analysis based on multiple media sources is cumbersome and time consuming and likely incomplete. What the ground news guys are claiming to offer is a service where they do some of that work for you and some kind of a methodology by which they do their analysis.
Whether one trusts them to do it, or if their analysis is fair, or how thorough they are or if their criteria and methodology provide a useful framework for analysis is a different question similarly hard to answer but I don’t see how your proposal for comparing against “facts” isn’t going to fail for the same reason simply consuming news media uncritically to try and stay informed would. Unless you’re experiencing events first hand or personally conducting journalism you’re always going to have limited capacity to know what the facts are or how they are distorted by the media from which you get them.
I find it’s very difficult to tell what the truth is at the time of reporting. As you point out, there are many different perspective, sometimes facts are omitted, or presented in a way that creates biases, and so on. Seeing many different perspectives can help find the ground truth because you can see what facts are being consistently reported across the spectrum.
However, what the actual truth is tends to clear up over time, and this is why I find that it’s really useful to look back and see how close the reporting from different sources was compared to what we now know with relative confidence to be true. This is how I evaluate what sources I tend to put more weight on compared to others. I also find it tends to be useful to follow the analysis along with the facts being reported. If somebody provides analysis that’s proven correct more often than not, then it’s an indicator that their reasoning on the subject is well informed.
As an example, a lot of people like Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer were dismissed at the start of the war because what they said didn’t align with the narrative. Now that the fog of propaganda is starting to clear, we can see that they were largely correct.
Is there any illusion at this point that the right and Russia aren’t fully aligned?
Basically every source on Ground News is some flavor of right wing.
Right, but that does comparative journalism itself by collating all of it together also with Russian State Media
