" It just seems that your post may have come from a limited and 100% partisan source such as one of the opinion shows on either CNN or MSNBC. Flipping thru the various left/right wing "news" outlets myself, I heard every one of your arguments, almost verbatim, at one time or another on both of those outlets myself."
First of all, I never watch CNN for news or analysis, and I watch MSNBC for news at some points during the day - none of the analysis shows that run in prime time like Maddow because their take is clearly slanted.
I think I'm intelligent enough to arrive at those same arguments independently - I don't need them to tell me what to think.
Rachel Maddow is a smart person. She was a Rhodes scholar and received a Ph.D. in politics from Oxford. Contrast that with Sean Hannity, who was a college dropout. But where Hannity is unabashedly conservative, Maddow is unabashedly liberal - so in my mind, neither of them can be trusted to provide anything approaching a "balanced" view in their opinions. Of the two of them, Hannity is the only one to espouse conspiracy theories (remember Seth Rich?). My approach to reading news is to avoid things labeled as "editorial", "opinion", or "analysis" because that's where the slant really comes into play.
Way back when I was in college, I briefly flirted with journalism, and the first thing they taught us was the "W's" - where, why, who, when, and how. That's what went into a story, and anything beyond that was an opinion and had no place in a what you were reporting.
Many years later I met a woman who was a photographer for a NYC tabloid and through her, I met a lot of other photographers and reporters for NYC media outlets - print, broadcast, cable (which was new at the time) - and I kinda learned how the sausage is made. So when I assess a media source, I pretty much know what to look for. The mainstream media - ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, FOX - all tend to adhere to a standard in their reporting and try to keep the editorial side out of it. The left-wing/right-wing "news" sites - not so much. They regularly mix news and opinion, so I generally discount them. They don't know how to do journalism, and so they aren't credible. Worse, some of them just make stuff up. Breitbart and The Daily Caller are perfect examples - if I see either of them cited as a source, I discount them as possibly fake news unless I can confirm it elsewhere, but their reports almost always mix reporting and opinion. That's not news - that's editorial posing as news. |
