I am getting tired of LaMonte Fowler's rudeness, and so are my readers. But I press onward; it's actually mild compared with much that I encounter—hence both my concern for the future and my delight over my young relative's attitude, from which this series sprung.
FoxNews, CNN and MSNBC have an agenda and are not “fair and balanced” or in any way unbiased. I’ll reiterate... read more. Read newspapers (even online ones). Read lots of opinions and sources and then (stay with me here), THINK! Form your own opinion based on as many facts as your can brain can tolerate.
Speaking of facts... there actually is a difference between facts, opinions and propaganda. You should learn the difference. (Another opportunity to show off your mad reading skills.)
Beyond the insults, there is truth here, and it's about time someone spoke it, though it's hardly news. Longer ago than I care to admit I remember my father coming home from a lecture one night, very impressed by the speaker, a new, young Canadian journalist named Peter Jennings. The primary thrust of his speech was that all news reporting is biased; it's best to admit that up front so that your audience knows where you are coming from. The best defense for the audience is to consult many sources, as Fowler suggests.
But not exactly as Fowler suggests. He seems to have a prejudice in favor of newspapers. I'll admit to my own prejudice for the printed word, but newspapers are just as biased as any other source. I'd also recommend expanding one's source collection to include foreign news outlets. I found the perspective of a French news program on the Brexit to be much more interesting and comprehensive than anything I saw from U.S. sources. And even though I could hardly believe it myself, the best and most accurate reporting I found on a story about which I knew more than usual was from—Al Jazeera.
And why stop at current events? The study of history is also rife with bias. Perhaps it's useless, when American students graduate high school having learned little history at all, to ask that they be shown multiple, divergent sources beyond their textbooks. But otherwise it's not education, but indoctrination.
No doubt fueled as much by the marketing power of sensationalism as by the desire to promote their own points of view, it is our news sources themselves—which at least once pretended to report the facts—that have blurred the lines between fact, opinion, and propaganda.
Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and all the rest are ENTERTAINERS! Stop getting your opinions from them. (Here’s where that reading thing can really be an advantage.)
Is it a good or bad thing that the only one of these I didn't have to look up is Rush Limbaugh? I don't know if they, like John Oliver, admit to being entertainers, but if you have a TV or radio show, that's what you are. As the Geico commercial says, "It's what you do." I do now see that these examples are all considered conservatives, and I must make the point that liberals do exactly the same thing. Fowler does his audience a disservice by not admitting that. Nor is the phenomenon limited to visual/auditory media. Newspapers and magazines maintain circulation, books sell, and blogs (which mix all media) prosper by making themselves entertaining. The veracity of a subject is independent of whether or not I am entertained by its presentation.
Forming one's own opinions is a lot harder than Fowler implies. Most of us are too busy living our lives to put in the necessary time and research. At some point, we simply have to trust our sources. And verify when we can.
