I want what I think to be true, and I can convince myself that something is true when I don’t know what’s going on. My adult son and I conversed about how news delivery has changed compared to when I was his age. It seemed like I could easily access investigative reporting which provided objective facts and allowed me to determine a situation for myself. I wasn’t told what to think as much as today.
Investigative reporting funding has clearly tanked, so today’s general public can’t access factual news as we did thirty years ago. Today’s news is distributed through six major corporations who say the same information, including the same writing, and viewpoints are tracked online by what we examined in previous news.
Subjective ‘feature’ reports start with where a journalist was, or what was going on for the writer, before we begin to read the point of a story.
Gone are quick first paragraph addressing Who, What, Where, When, Why and How facts, that allow a reader to decide whether or not to continue with reading a story. We have to work hard just to learn what’s going on.
How do you get the facts? How do you know if they are factual?
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