Getting the Actual News

[MineralMan]

The first step is recognizing the difference between actual news and commentary. There's lots and lots of actual news out there. It relates something that has happened, without commenting on it. You'll find it on the main pages of most large newspapers, on local and major network television stations during their brief straight news programs. You sometimes have to filter out minor commentary to find the actual information, but it's there.

Where the news isn't is on editorial pages and the vast wasteland that is cable commentary. It used to be that cable networks like CNN actually broadcast the news, but that's changed, except for a few short programs each day. Most of what is on cable is pure commentary, where the news is dissected and only the news that matches some talking head's political position is presented.

It's also not on most Internet "news" sites. Most of that is also commentary. You can often find the news on the Internet by clicking links to the original sources, which are generally newspapers and network and local news programs on TV. Commentary is always biased in one direction or another. If you want to draw your own conclusions, skip the commentary and look at the original reporting. Reporting is the key. Reporting tells what happened, and maybe grabs quotes from actual witnesses to what happened. Reporting presents the basic information about an event, without telling you how you should think about it.

If you want to get the news, look for reporting. Skip the rest. Think about what happened and form your own opinion. Once you start doing that, you'll quickly discover that all those sources that are primarily commentary leave much of the actual story out, and only present what matches the viewpoint of the commentator. Reporting tells you what happened, and leaves the rest for you to figure out.

Even on DU, when someone posts something, it's usually commentary of one sort or another. Drill down to the original source, through the links, until you find some actual reporting. See the eyewitness accounts and reporting of events. Always be skeptical if the person telling you what happened wasn't actually there or didn't actually talk to people who were.

Unfiltered news, reported without comment, is the key to understanding what is going on. Commentary is someone else telling you how to think.

That said, what appears above is pure commentary. Take it for whatever you think it's worth.

[kickysnana]

1. This post is sure timely

I watch Fox9 in the morning because they do have some news on their crawl but the anchors spent 5 minutes playing drums at 8:45a and our conservative leaning editor of the New Brighton Paper lead editorial was on rusty metal chickens/Beyonce this week. (Perhaps she couldn't run her planned oped). The gal on Fox9 who actually did a great job of being fair on the GOP convention, war on protests/protesters here appears to no longer work there. (I am terrible with anchor names.)

I turned to WCCO4 weekend morning or whatever they call it and Esme Murphy is interviewing the same political consultant they always use and of course her question is "How can the Obama say he has a mandate when the popular vote was so close." I didn't wait for the answer but I would have said that nobody suppressed the GOP votes hundreds of thousands of Dem votes were supressed/provisionalized/switched in many, many locations and in fact they are still counting.

So I guess it is DU, Rachel, Ellen Goodman, & BBC. In St Paul I could watch Deutche-Welle (sp)/China on local cable but not here.

[MineralMan]

3. WCCO's weekday evening news is pretty newsy. There are lots

of stories to tell that are interesting or useful to Twin Cities residents. Occasionally, they'll interview some political commentator, but that's infrequent except around election time. Their stories are well-reported, generally. The weekend local news shows aren't the same thing at all. Esme is a personality, and there are no reporting teams out telling people what happened that day. That show and the other weekend morning news programs on WCCO simply aren't worth watching, if news is your goal.

Both local papers cover local and national news. They have editorial pages, but the news is there on the main pages of the paper, both local and national. Between the two early evening WCCO news programs, I generally watch the CBS evening news. They only have half an hour, so they stick pretty much to news coverage and reporting.

Rachel is a commentator. I love her madly, and agree with most of what she has to say. But she doesn't report the news. Neither do any of the other commentators. On DU, we do get some news, particularly when it's something that's not political, like a storm or earthquake. Beyond that, most of what is posted here is commentary. Sometimes the commentators are worth reading. Other times they are not. It's not news, though. It's commentary. All commentary is biased. That's its nature.

I use the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Times of London for most other news, and stick to the main pages. There, I generally find plenty of actual reported news to think about.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. I would also add: Watch out for satire!

These days it's sometimes hard to tell satire from reality - there's some awfully absurd and weird stuff that actually happens - but let's not pounce on every "report" that makes our political adversaries look even dumber or more extreme or bizarre than they actually are, and post it on DU as a news story without checking whether it's real or parody. There's this thing called confirmation bias, and we are all susceptible to it. So when we read somewhere on the Internet (everything on the Internet is true, right?) that someone we love to loathe has said or done something particularly outrageous, we want to believe it's true.

But please vet your source a little bit before posting; most satire sites identify themselves as such on their home page. The Onion's pieces are usually pretty recognizable as satire, but there are other, less well-known sites, like The Daily Currant, for example, that also produce satirical or parodic items. Most of these are not as clever as The Onion's stuff; good satire is quickly recognizable as satire and produces the desired laughs, while bad satire just exaggerates reality until the exaggeration veers off toward libel. If the allegedly outrageous statement or behavior is actually true, chances are it will appear in the despised Mainstream Media as well as in some obscure Internet site or blog, because the MSM also loves controversy and outrage. If there's only one source it might not be true, which is something all good journalists know. We shouldn't let our normal tendency toward confirmation bias lure us into posting something that makes us look gullible.

[MineralMan]

4. If you click the links, it's usually pretty easy to tell

whether something's satire or real. That's why I click the links. When someone posts satire, I generally point that out if it's not clear to everyone. Sometimes, I even write my own satire on DU. When I do, I include a link to a website that doesn't even exist, and call it something like www.newsyoucantbelieve.com. Even then, sometimes people think what I wrote was real. Click the links to get to the bottom of things before making any assumptions, and you'll have a better idea of the value of what has been posted here.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. The problem is that people often don't click the links.

The OP posts something satirical assuming it's true (having failed to read the piece carefully), then people read only the OP without reading the item itself (wherein they would probably figure out that it was satire), and fall all over themselves in fits of high dudgeon - all of which could be avoided if the person posting the item in the first place did not assume it to be factual and post it as such, or else, having found the piece amusing, identified it as satire. Those reading the original post should also suspend credulity and, as you suggest, click the damn link. I get tired of having to point out that something is satire when it would be so easy to figure it out. Which gets me back to my original point regarding confirmation bias: We want to believe terrible things about people we don't like.