by Joliette 24 Replies latest jw friends
All of the above.
I'd go with Terry's advice first. Look at all sources. Avoid one source and avoid Fox and MSNBC. Totally biased.
Read all stories to get all sides. I like the international side to see what people looking in see and report.
Oh, good luck and happy reading.
Yep, gotta mix it up and use your head. If someone is telling you that proposed bill xyz is going to make life sunshine and rainbows, and someone else is telling you it's going to euthanize your granny, go read the bill. When they speak of generalities like "big government", find out exactly what that means. Does it mean a clean water act, or banning marriage. Local news can be pretty good for short and to the point reporting on the big stuff, and beyond the local violence, it's actually a good thing to know what is happening in ones own community. Washington Post and LA times are good, PBS and NPR are good and probably the least biased. BBC and Al Jazeera are very interesting. If it's a particular story that you want to know more about, I often go to that local paper/news station. I stay away from "opinion" pieces. Which are everywhere these days. If it doesn't have quotes and original sources, I don't trust it. Watch out for things like "some say" or "an insider tells us" or "sources are reporting"...............Fox is notorious for that, because they own so much media, they are actually quoting themselves.
It is impossible for nonbiased news. My newspapers are The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, sometimes I read the Washington Post for pressing presidential or Congressional news as an addition to the Times. The Times is what every public official reads. It has enormous imptce. The Times has a definite liberal stance but it is not unrestrained liberalism. It is the newspaper of record. Obama reads the NY Times, as did Bush and Reagan.
My TV sources are CNN and PBS. Charlie Rose on PBS is utterly fascinating. I also watch C-Span regularly. They cover public stuff as a service. Washington Week is also good.
For international news and perspective, The Economist is priceless. It is very expensive. Foreign Affairs is crucial if that is your interest.
Vanity Fair and the New Yorker are also good sources for me.
This is the Eastern media. I find them very fair and balance. Yet I always strive to remember their mind set is the same as mine. To balance this fact, I may read National Review, the Wall St. Journal. I will not degrade myself by reading Fox News. Their commentators are idiots who know better. George Will is a decent conservative source. David Brooks is ok, too. I try to expose myself to conservative and libertarian thinkers who have the same great quality as the New York Times, et al but have a different bias.
I adore the NY Times. As a teenager, I walked up tall hills for quite a distance to purchase a copy. Educated NYers adore the Times (but we supplement it with the Daily News or Post if something major is happening in the city.) . Everyone in DC reads The Times. A friend joked that New Yorkers don't have a thought or opinion in their heads until the Times tells them what to think. This is very true.
What Terry and Berengaria said. Since there is no such thing as unbiased news (everybody is bringing some baggage, whether they admit it or not) you have to try to parse the information yourself. When ever possible (and this is getting a LOT easier with the internet) go to original sources. It seems to me that the morning shows on CNN and Fox are better at just telling us what happened. By evening the editors and commentators are putting spin on it and facts and opinions are mushed together.
The best formats are the panel shows, were either you have mutiple news people, or interviewees from both sides talking to each other.
Forgot the "compatibility button again. Sorry.
I was saying that no human agency is unbiased. And your average journalist is nothing but an average human being working for a human agency.
So the best thing I've found is to get information from as wide and varied a range of sources as possible and then analyze the data critically and rationally and balance them all against each other. The Internet is a godsend in this regard.
I would just add the The Drudge Report and the WSJ are quite biased in their commentary.
I like NPR for interesting reporting on stories you don't see anywhere else and objective news coverage.
For major news stories - such as the economy, historical perspectives and in-depth analysis, I read books.
Otherwise, one just has to be aware of the difference between hard news and commentary.
Uh, no, they don't exist. This "unbiased news network" is the magical unicorn you seek but will never find, no matter how many damn rainbows you spot! Sorry, had a Glenn Beck moment. Oh wait, that would be Hitler-unicorns or something. The closest thing to that is probably your local newspaper, oddly enough. I find that to be true of mine. And, what I do is read papers, watch TV, read stuff online, all from a variety of sources, and I try to just take it all with a grain of salt, hoping the biases will cancel out. This is where skepticism is a must. There's too much Bull**** circulating in the news. ALL the news. Yes, Fox, you are biased as all hell too. Yes, internet, sometimes your info isn't reliable. Yes, CNN and HLN, sometimes you don't focus on the important stuff. I just try to make sense of all the crap, synthesize and analyze.
I second "The Onion". It's where I get all my news from.
Oh, yeah, and Stephen Freakin Colbert...he's great. I don't know about not being opinionated, but I prefer my misery and world events with coffee and a laugh. Gotta be positive sometimes and just realize politics is BS and a game we can laugh at.
