Filed under: Politics
There are increasing numbers of people reporting what they consider to be “the news”. Where once it was just newspapers that one turned to for “the news”, now we have radio, television,the internet, and Do you feel your friends and neighbors are well informed on the state of the world? There are huge numbers of sources with blogs, and newspapers all over the country, and the news online is so vast that you can’t even enumerate the sources. Some are real, serious reporters trying to discuss the national conversation, and report the facts, and a constant immense flow of opinion, facts and guesses from familiar and unfamiliar sources. One can turn to long established and trusted news organizations or unidentified reporting from unknown posts online from unknown people with unknown credibility. How does one know who to trust?
I think this is an emerging and poorly understood problem. One can turn to sources like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and hundreds of other well known and trusted purveyors of news, but then there’s all that other stuff! Are we ending up with way too many sources and too little authentication? Are the people actually better informed, or more ill-informed because of the proliferation of sources? I have no answers, but find the situation somewhat alarming. If we had a national quiz on current events and their meaning and authority, how would we do? What is really happening in the world, and what does it mean?
Do you feel confident in your understanding of the state of the world and war and peace? Russia and Ukraine, for example, or Germany and Russia, or Japan and China? Me neither. Are the news reports we read clarifying or confusing?
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
American Elephants 