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If not “MSM,” what news sources do conservatives use? I want to know what you use. I suspect it’s not Fox News.

Oh, they totally use Fox News. "Mainstream media" is a buzzword that refers to the political leanings of a media outlet, rather than its actual popularity. If a media source 3ver reports anything you disagree with or don't want to believe, just call it "mainstream" and ignore it!

Of course, liberal extremists do this too. Crying "mainstream media" is a sign of idiocy regardless of political affiliation.

Story's been out for a few hours. I heard it from the NYT first because the tablet I'm using has the app by default.

From the article:

"The appearance of the dossier, which does not appear to have been generated by an American intelligence agency as it does not contain its standard caveats or guidance about levels of "confidence," is another twist in the sometimes surreal story about Trump's historic political success. Senators and intelligence leaders on Tuesday described the dangers of foreign mischief in the political systems of the U.S. and its allies, and the Trump-Kremlin dossier is a quintessential example."

I'm curious as to how they even found out about this before it was verified. Why would these be let out to news companies before they could even verify any of its info?

I'm barely right-leaning, but I'll answer for myself: I generally don't. Over time, I've become less reliant on a particular news source and instead developed a methodology to inform myself, though I must admit that I have a bit of a righty bias with all the hysteria that I've had to look into since last year. As far as I'm concerned, "fake news" is far less pervasive and problematic (not to mention easier to spot) than bad journalism. Generally speaking though, if your site looks like balls and/or you have more than a detached voice in a non-op piece or if you go full HuffPo and do your "due diligence" in reminding me of how much of a (insert buzzwords here) Trump is every time I have to read a Trump-related piece from you, I'm probably never going to take you seriously as a news source.

>those twitter comments

I am completely out of the loop, but if this is a purely unsubstantiated rumor gone viral, it's very saddening that it's being spread like this.

EDIT: So I did my research, and speaking of bad journalism, Buzzfeed reminds me of why they're just awful.

Though the above article has the e-mail of Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, here's a link to the tweet with the e-mail.

Literally publishing unverified info when other, far more reputable sources than your clickbait garbage declined to because it was unverified and was even noted to be perhaps irregular in form, is possibly the prime example of bad journalism.

Some do, but I think a lot of conservatives here recognize that if outlets like CNN and MSNBC have agendas, then Fox News has one as well. So I figure anyone using "MSM" with a negative connotation would avoid it, but I don't know what outlets are remaining that would have a small enough audience to not be "mainstream" but be large enough to stay afloat (because you can't really stay a decent journalism outlet without some solid reporters and investigators with resources, and you have to be able to pay them high-grade beans (otherwise, they'd just take their talents elsewhere, and you'd be left with less reputable and hard-working journalists).

I was most interested in broadcast journalism when I left (ha!) high school wanting to attend UGA's Grady School, so I worked in radio for a bit before I got my diploma. And even at a radio station where the political leanings were of the religious right, they told me that most stations got their news from Associated Press/newswire. You'd get very specific bits of news and nothing else.

The AP has probably branched out and would suffer the same issue that journalism has right now:

• an audience wanting to know news first more than they want to know the actual news
• and an audience that is very forgiving if the news sounds the way they want, right, wrong, or unverified.

So it's not beyond the AP to want to be the first if they're no longer the premier news source (and I suspect they can't be). But their articles are generally pretty straight with little leaning.

NPR feels very liberal, but I never got the feeling as if they had it out for conservatives in any of the news shows they had.

[If not “MSM,” what news sources do conservatives use? I want to know what you use. I suspect it’s not Fox News.]

There are a couple I swear by, but there's only one that really counts: the Drudge Report.

There's this conception that Drudge is this right-wing fanatic, which is somewhat incorrect. He's definitely conservative, there's no question about that, but most of his links actually go to CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. He uses just about every single internet news source there is. He's a news aggregator with conservative leanings.

What is conservative about the Drudge Report is not its sources, but its editorial policy. Big stories are usually posted with headlines which present the story from a conservative perspective. As an example, this latest Russian-Trump claim's link is titled "Are corrupt US intel agencies blackmailing Trump with their own dirt cleverly tagged to 'Russian' operatives?" which (unusually) links to Drudge's Twitter which itself links to the CNN story. And smaller stories tend to be those interesting to conservatives and conservative issues.

There's a tabloid quality to the headlines, and there are very rare times he gets something factually wrong, but really the Drudge Report is an indispensable news site. Even liberals able to look past the headlines would find it useful, since the majority of his links direct users to MSM sites. It is particularly useful for breaking news stories.

As I mentioned, there are a couple other sites I use quite a bit for news. One is a conservative blog, which I find helpful for political analysis. There are a number of sites I check regularly for news about ISIS and terrorism, but really the most helpful I've come across is liveuamap. It's a good reference point for what is going on with ISIS at any given moment.

As to the latest "But teh Russians," I have to say, I'm done with it. I don't believe it, and the fact that we keep receiving dribbles of allegations makes me doubt doubt there is any solid proof. It's all anonymous and un-sourced allegations presented by people whose skill set includes making up anonymous and un-sourced allegations. There's no way to prove what is true or not, so at this point it's comes down to whether you trust US intelligence agencies. Since one's position on the issue is a matter of faith, and since that won't change unless real, indisputable evidence gets released, and since I am near certain that will never happen, I can't see any reason to continue discussing the issue.

The last point I feel like contributing to this story is the fact that John McCain is involved in this process does nothing to change my suspicions. I've read enough about him to know he's as connected with and as corrupted by the political system as Hillary Clinton is, and he has very specific reasons for supporting intelligence agencies working to pin a Russian conspiracy on Trump, and these reasons go beyond Trump's comments about McCain being a POW. It's a very long and complicated story I won't delve into here. There are other places you can find such information if you're interested.

You know i was giving it a skeptical but honest chance, the same i did with the emails from clinton. But the stuff in the actual story, this report being unverified, nobody being willing to comment despite having every reason to have people in them who would like to see Trump takem down by this, the fact the report didn't follow any US protocols or in other words did not look like it was legit.

Then i found out this was from Buzzfeed, and all my little trust.went down the pooper.

There are a number of sites I check regularly for news about ISIS and terrorism, but really the most helpful I’ve come across is liveuamap.

While it has a left lean, I've found this week in war by The Political Notebook interesting to see every now and then. It's a long list of, well, what happened this week relating to war. It seems to occasionally throw a few other things into it every now and then, but it focuses primarily on war.

It covers a lot of stuff that you'll probably hear nowhere else unless you have some other war-focused news source.

The most interesting thing I get from it, honestly, is the realization that shit is always going down. Constantly.

Tell me about it.

Liveumap is almost real-time. I generally stick to the ISIS filter, but it's got several other options. It allows you get a sense of scale for Sunni-Shia terror attacks and other strife we don't hear about in the West but is part of the daily grind for a large part of the world. And it provides similar coverage for the Ukraine conflict, which we hear nothing about.

Spend 20 minutes on Liveumap and you'll realize we live in a violent world. And even they probably cover about .01 percent of what is actually happening.

Whoever runs their US political coverage is pretty biased towards the left IMO though. There's a lot of cherry-picked Tweets and other things taken out of context that are superficially true but presented in a deceptive way.

Do they present all factions present in the area?

FBI states there's no evidence current RNC computer systems were hacked by Russia.

Verbose said:

what news sources do conservatives use?

My parents watch Fox and occasionally read Breitbart while my brother's a fan of Drudge's news aggregator. I tend to just use Google News and sift the articles depending on which way the site leans (MSNBC, Huffpost, Salon, Slate, NPR, WAPO, NYT, the Gawker sites, and LA Times to the left; ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, USA Today, Detroit News, Mlive, and Time more in the middle with an occasional left lean; and Fox, Washington Times, Breitbart, WSJ, National Review, and OAN to the right).

And what do you think of this document?

After looking at it, I'm highly skeptical. I could format that in Word in a few minutes and then fill it with "Source B, a White House staffer with close links to the oval office, stated that Obama rapes puppies every evening in order to quote 'calm down after dealing with Biden's shit.'"

If it was actually captured on camera, show some screenshots. Not useless "unnamed sources." In other words, pics or GTFO.

Also,

The former MI6 agent’s writeup of the alleged info on Trump was reportedly paid for by those supporting other Republicans, and then by those supporting Hillary Clinton.

The alleged author has a very blatant agenda so I'm inclined to trust him even less.

Michael Cohen: ''It is fake news meant to malign Mr. Trump.''

I don't think urination is a political policy, but we're a meme site so it's fine.

So what's this I hear about Trump "nationalizing himself"?

So what say you on this? Apparently, Trump has conceded that Russia hacked the DNC.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/trumps-press-conference-highlights-russia.html?_r=0

RUN AWAAAY!

Somewhat of a derailment to the conversation, but something I am thinking about these days:

Are we coming to a point in our history where we can create an Ecological Casus Belli?

Ultimately, if the fears of AGW becomes more and more apparent, and not enough is done by numerous nations, mostly third world, would nations such as the US declare war to force ecological legislature? Would the US be declared war upon if the environmental damage that it is causing is directly affecting another nation?

I doubt it honestly.

If you think about it, a lot of people don't really fervently care that much about the environment. I mean a lot of people understand the needs for the environment, but a lot of people also don't realize that living things are pretty hardy. I mean everything that's currently living survived 5 and even possibly 6 if you consider the time of humans a mass extinction event. Also if we develop a way to survive without the environment then you can be sure we'll probably care a lot less about it. In the end, the need for industry will probably trump the necessity of the environment, and we'll either develop a way to live without it or die because of our own stupidity.

TL:DR Prepare for a Forge World Earth

This is largely why I feel we need to focus our efforts on green energy and astronautics. I believe if Humanity wants to survive we need to start spreading out. I believe within the next 200 years humanity will absolutely need to start to spread out into space-stations, mars colonies, and moon colonies if it is going to survive. The first nation to create a cheap system of transporting stuff into space would have such a massive economic advantage that they would probably become an economic super power alone.

I also dislike private space agencies being the future. The advantage of NASA is that when they create a scientific advancement everyone gains access to that technology (Smoke Detectors, Scratchless glass, etc). If a private company creates a new technological advancement they can technically just keep it to themselves. I think Elon Musk has the right idea and the right heart, but I just don't trust private companies.

One of my greatest fears of this republican government is that they won't push for advancement in astronautics which is a huge industry just waiting for the right pieces to fall into play.

Are we coming to a point in our history where we can create an Ecological Casus Belli?

Declaring war to solve an ecological crisis is like using a flamethrower to kill weeds in your garden. Also seeing as most (if not all) of the major pollutant makers are nuclear superpowers that will likely kill any thought of an outright war.

One of my greatest fears of this republican government is that they won’t push for advancement in astronautics which is a huge industry just waiting for the right pieces to fall into play.

Rather optimistic thinking I'd say. As much as I'd like to put boots on Mars within this lifetime I'd rather not devote resources to it at the moment. It's a billion-dollar investment with a serious life-threatening risk for many people involved (both astronauts and engineers). The rewards seem too insubstantial or too speculative for the short-term in order for there to be sustainability for the long term. In other words, if there's no solid investment within a few short years it's not going to be sustainable for decades, at least to me.