Can Mainstream News Be Trusted?
Years ago an opinion poll named CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite —The Most Trusted Man In America.
If you’d take an on the street survey today I believe you’d find that all of media is the least trusted news resource in America.
Whatever legacy of honest news reporting Walter established is pretty much long gone.
What Is Accurate Reporting?
Most people would say that the news media should only report the facts nothing more. How is that possible?
How do you teach impartiality when we make judgment calls about every experience every day?
When we tell a friend about an experience do we only present the facts? Hardly we tailor the story to meet our emotional needs.
How can we expect reporters and news anchors to do anything less? Every one of my 1,000 plus blogs has some of my personal feelings and biases within it.
But I don’t pretend to be objective since my blogs are my opinion of the facts as I see them.
How To Spin A Story
Let’s take a set of facts. A fictional boat race between the US and Russia. Russia wins the race so lets report that accurately.
The Russian news agency reports that a boat race between the US and Russia took place and the Russian ship won the race.
The US news media reported that a boat race INCLUDING the US and Russia took place and that the US ship came in second and the Russian ship was next to last.
Were both reports accurate? Were all the necessary facts included?
But we’ve got two obviously conflicting stories for the readers.
Some Final Thoughts
Not sure there is any way that someone can be completely objective. Even Supreme Court justices who are supposed to interpret the law in black and white seem to bring their ideologies with them to the bench.
Unless you’re an eyewitness to an event you’re going to have to look to several different sources to get a fully accurate account of the actual event.
The problem is very few people are going to go to that much trouble to get their news.
It’s so much easier to find a source that matches up with your emotional ideology and never change the channel.
Why subject yourself to viewpoints that you might not agree with?
In a world of 24/7 sound bites and competition to be first with the story on a global scale we may be looking at a future of bad news.
What’s the main source of your news?
Comments below.
More From KMMS-KPRK 1450 AM
