Looking for “Fair and Balanced” media? Doesn’t exist in today’s news August 25, 2008
“Fair and balanced”, what a joke. The advent of the 24/7 news channel has brought about a fight from the big players to be the most ‘fair and balanced’ network on the air. I think this is comical, as no station will ever truly be fair and balanced as long as there is a company culture behind the news being broadcast. Companies, like people, have interests that are best served by the outcome of certain sociological events, whether they’re elections, wars, trials, whatever. The media that is being fed to us comes from one source, and simply that fact alone means that that media is biased.
This post is stemming from a sort of thought stream that started the other night watching the Olympics with Luke, Taylor and Jeff. NBC and their web-based Olympic strategy prevented them from showing us some of the sports that we really wanted to see: Ping Pong, Sailing and Kayaking. What I started thinking about is that there really isn’t any news outlet that gives you the news that you want to see everyday. Services like Digg and Mixx attempt to do this and their idea is great, but I find their sites rather uninteresting due to the diluted nature of their front page stories. Digg allows their entire community to vote stories up or down, but since their community includes everyone in the world, the stories that show up are not as interesting to every individual.
Sure, there are RSS readers and content aggregators like Techmeme that are industry specific…but with the nature of how people create content nowadays, I feel like I’m never seeing some of the most interesting content out there. Even with sites like Digg and Mixx, how often are really interesting blog posts from industry specific professionals posted on the front pages? Even with Techmeme, most of the stories are from large blog networks like TechCrunch and GigaOm who aspire to play with the big guys. Individual blogs from interesting sources, much of the time coming from the front lines of a particular topic get lost in the fluff.
The solution seems to be what people have been doing for years: Going out and finding the news you want to see from traditional sources like the NY Times and CNN and then supplementing that content by searching for information on other stories they hear through word of mouth. Maybe someday there will be a better way…but for now, we can sit back and watch:
I think this is an important question to think about–especially in an election year. When should schools teach students about the media? How can kids become savvy consumers of information and learn to sift out facts from opinion? As a social studies teacher, I have to be concerned about this. I think the key is for students to be able to independently evaluate news sources by learning to sniff out biases and special interests.