Two Cents and a Thousand Words

In my Introduction to Mass Communication class last year, Professor Laura Lindenfeld told us that there is no such thing as an unbiased source. Since news is reported by people, she explained, news will have a slant due to each reporter’s individual opinion.

Unfortunately, I’m finding that this trait of news is emerging at a most inconvenient time. It seems as though there have been many occasions at which I have found myself literally swearing at media outlets for a variety of reasons: slanted “factual” stories, unfair reporting, or, what’s worst, completely falsified reports. To illustrate:

• The Associated Press released a story that was automatically picked up by local news feeds reporting that Bush had won the election. The story apparently did not contain some sort of marker that would tell sites that it was test data.
• The Daily Show (yeah, yeah, I know) seems ever more and more liberal, especially after the differences in Republican and Democratic interviews after the first debate.
• Fox News (yeah, yeah, I know) posted a story that was apparently an in-house joke from their chief political reporter saying that Kerry said, among other things, “I’m metrosexual.”

Has all of top-level journalism gone back to high school? This isn’t what you should be doing, folks.

In my opinion, this is where the Internet could really shine. Is it possible to have a close-to-unbiased source for news? From a technical standpoint, yes. There are some politically-driven sites out there that work very well - take MoveOn.org (yuck) and Daily Kos, for example - but the ones I’ve found have all taken one side or the other. Why can’t there be one single source where people from both sides healthily debate the issues and try to disprove what the other side says? There have been so many misleading statements this year from both camps that the sheer number of people researching on the Internet could definitely debunk everything. There should be a site somewhere that takes every word from the debate - or from every article published on major news sites - and tries to assure that the reporting is given in a correct context. If anyone knows of a site, please let me know: justin@justinrussell.com.

I’ll be going through a lot of changes soon, and I’m reconsidering what’s important to me (of which this issue is one) and where I want to spend my time. Soon I’ll be launching a new package that will replace my current blog, and I’ll also be working on other projects that will comprehensively rework my most major sites. It’s time for me to step up. And please don’t forget to do your part to make the world better, too.