Jay M. wrote:But, don't you have to be careful of the news sources you accept? It seems to me that there are many sources that purport to be news, but they have an agenda.
Very good point, Jay. I absolutely agree, and this is one of the great concerns about news sources "fragmenting," in my opinion. You can use the wealth of sources available to us wisely or foolishly or somewhere in between, and even if you're very careful, you've still got to filter a lot and be skeptical. I think this may be irreconcilable, as the old "newspapers of record" become a much less important part of the overall picture. It's not just newspapers, though. Not to get into a right-left thing, but does anyone really believe that Fox TV News is really "fair and balanced?" The other problem with fragmentation is that in the absence of one dominant voice it becomes easy to hear it all as just one dull roar, and it's not as easy to get the news as it was when you could pick up one trustworthy print source.
At one time at least you could count on the dailies to have trained, professional journalists who might have some semblance of a belief in their function as the fourth estate (even though the CJ leaned left, but at least I knew that
). Today, I'm always looking for the ulterior motives in what I read.
The scarier thing now is that it's no longer reasonable to assume that your local paper's news coverage isn't slanted. Not necessarily right vs left, but look at the Gannett CJ's antics with merger, the Museum Tower, the bridges and the arena project.
I really think that the biggest factor in the loss of the first two metro-merger efforts back in the 80s, and the more recent passage of metro, was that even though the publisher wanted merger to pass in the old days, he insisted that the news staff cover it skeptically, and never, ever let the editorial opinion show through in the news pages. In the more recent venture, the paper was almost embarrassing in the way it was a cheerleader for merger in the news pages. I'm not saying that merger was a bad thing, but certainly having a newspaper that takes sides in the news pages is. And the funny thing about it is that management never understood that by giving up its credibility, it was self-inflicting a possibly mortal wound. If you can't trust the paper to cover a major local issue even-handedly, how can you trust it to tell you where to eat dinner?
Not that any of this has anything much to do with Speakeasy.