Democrats organize to fight back

[Bob Butler 54]

(05-28-2017, 02:47 AM)Galen Wrote: The mainstream press hasn't really told the truth in years.  Even without the corporate outlets which really are the mainstream press we do have a free press.  They just live on the internet rather than on TV or the newspapers.  Go back and look at what the press was like in the nineteenth century sometime.

How do you all interpret the much spun news media?

I find most outlets report facts pretty much honestly.  The facts will of course be selected, be spun.  Every world view and set of values comes with a notion of what is important and how it ought to be interpreted.  Most of us gets their basic information on the world through a spun source.  Most of us are tempted to reject information unless the news organization’s spin matches our own spin.

The commentary is spun or selected as well.  If something is said in Washington, the political commentary and pundit sound bites are apt to be slanted to favor the news organization’s agenda.  You might hear a competent well spoken spokesman for the favored side of the story, and an strident partisan less articulate spokesmen from the opposition.  This is to be expected.  If one cares about the story or issue, one ought access and consider more than one version of it.

There are also outlets that aren’t making a pretense of reporting news.  Their function seemingly is to push a certain political point of view.  The objective is propaganda, often as blatant and one sided as the Soviet Union’s old Pravda.  Such sources might be valued less for reports of what is going on, more like an insight into what the nut jobs on the opposite side have deluded themselves into thinking.  (Mind you, in this context, nobody has a particular monopoly on nut jobs.)

It seems that a lot of folk find a few sources that spin to their preference.  They listen to whatever they want to hear and despise other sources as prejudiced false news.  I find that on a controversial story you likely have to hear as sample of what various extreme folk are saying, and the kinda sorta almost trust the main line reporting but with insight from the extremes.  This forum is kinda like that.  You get heavily spun opinions which the author believes are objective rational writing, followed by a counter piece, often with different selected facts, definitely differently selected theories that structure said facts, but with the same delusion of having the one and only objective angle on the story.

There is no lack of information or opinions in todays media.  There is a surplus of conflicting information and opinions,  If you want a pretense of something resembling truth, you have to assume that all sources are spun, estimate the spin, and often read other sources that are known to carry an opposite spin.  Reading anything from anywhere, I might spend nigh on as much mental effort figuring the outlet’s editorial and political policies as picking up information on the supposed story.  

I figure competitive and comparative news reading ought to be a mandatory high school course.  Everybody ought to know the common value systems a story is spun through, how to compare and contrast the same story told with different spin, and perhaps learn that the other guys aren’t fanatic crazies, they have just bought into too narrow a section of information sources.