Most of what I read is suffocatingly leftwing tbh, but it’s not overly intellectualized, it more pushes back against particular narratives when they start forming in the mainstream news. I’m terrible with economics so I find the more technical Brexit stuff pretty tedious and dull at times even though I know it’s important .
Alternet is definitely suffocatingly left wing, but they’re generally spot on, if sometimes a bit too pro-Assad wrt Syria (“We aren’t saying Assad is a nice guy, but…”) It’s like, guys, you can say everyone but the civilians are shitbags in that war, it’s not a crime. Anyway, it does have some good articles about South America and the Middle East on there.
Al Jazeera is good but I try to bear in mind it is a Qatar-funded organization, so while its coverage of SA, Africa, Asia and Europe is good, when it covers Syria, Iran, etc, there’s a definite agenda there.
Shadowproof, Electronic Intifada, both massively biased but I don’t mind.
TBH I also follow lots of individual journalists on Twitter. Rania Khalek, Lily Lynch, Mark Ames, Amal Saad (well she’s an academic but an expert on Hezbollah and the Palestinian struggle), Taibbi, Mehdi Hassan, Max Blumenthal, Luke Savage, Adam Johnson for media analysis, etc.
Ames did an episode of Unauthorized Disclosure with Khalek where he broke down Russia post-1990 and explained how Putin thinks, how he rose to power, how the oligarchs plundered the country with America’s backing, why this happened and why this made so many Russians distrustful of America even if they don’t care for Putin, etc. It helped me understand a lot about post-Soviet history.
I see this on tankie twitter all the time, it’s really weird but pretty funny. Reminds me of those pro-Assad “Lion of Damascus” memes (although that’s just weird).