Pat Oliphant for May 29, 2009

i’m a staunch defender of a free press, but our media is failing us with talkfests and endless insider speculation with less and less news gathering and reporting …. especially broadcast news … and the great gray giants are fading

cable news is now full of tweets and twittering and tell us what you think on facebook ….

it’s discouraging to me

Broadcast News with real journalists that researched and truley presented the news is dead. Now it is all opinoins and speculation media…

Except the Internet provides no obvious means of sorting tin-hat nonsense from sober, dedicated, objective reporting. Soon all “news” will be equal…

It’s true you know; how many times have you seen someone holding up the latest Drudge Report like a tablet from Mount Sinai?

But what’s even more frightening to me motive is the number of people who think Rush, Hannity, etc. are legitimate news sources. We’ve been seeing an example of it on this board lately, as a matter of fact.

Of course, on this side of the pond, the BBC IS an international news source.

Do you have any sites that you would recommend, satipera?

Etaoin Shrdlu!

satiperi & Simon – oh, I agree. I use www.CEOexpress.com, which has bazillions of links.

There’s something to be said for Google News…look up a story, and find the reports (and op-eds) from many different sources on it.

It’s all about economics. It’s much cheaper to talk about the news than to go out and report it. Plus the broadcasters have learned over the years that they can attract a larger audience with sensationalism and celebrities. Broadcast news used to be considered a public service. Now it’s just another way to rake in more dollars.

Howie, I knew there was SOMETHING we could agree on :-D

tracht, good point, when the networks were purchased by big corporations, the news divisions needed to turn a big profit like entertainment divisions and the true “reporting” aspects of news turned into “this is what one side says, this is what the other side says, you decide”

and that’s contributed to the sharp divisions in our country, because there is so little “shared understanding” as there used to be when news outlets reported facts

the internet is here and it’s plethora of “news” sites has positive aspects for the public. But with that comes some responsibility for news consumers to discern facts from opinions and objective reporting from cherrypicking and slanting.

here are some sites I use to try to discern facts and context:

http://www.politifact.com

http://www.factcheck.org/

and of course www.snopes.com for those nasty viral e-mails

I’d love to add more pure fact-checking sites if others know of them !

Thanks for all the great links.

“SHRDLU”… the old linotype nonsense word…. something I haven’t see in a cartoon for a very long time. Emile Mercer used to employ it too

Thanks mate!

I don’t share the cynicism of the nihilist “print is dead” movement. I prefer the fatalist, absolutist comic truth of Tristram Shandy or Ecclesiastes to the transient pap and porn of the New York Times.

Olbermann or Maddow? No, I don’t think so. I’ve never seen anyone say, cut and paste from either of them in response to three differenct cartoons the way a certain dittohead did with Rush recently.

But then there’s the Huffington Post; I know a couple of Progressives who draw that thing like a gun whenever they get into a debate.

And that’s not good either.

I don’t think we need the media to tell us how to think!!

After Mom died, I found some old newspapers she saved. Besides being about twice as big as today’s, they were packed full of facts and figures, dull tide tables, almanac items like sunrise, sunset, and who got arrested, drunk, birthed, and died. Who was that new guy in town and how’s business at the hardware store. Pictures, want-ads, comics. There was only one page with opinions. Weird.

Alsboi, your Mom must have lived in my town. Our paper is just a weekly but you’ve listed just about everything in it. Except no comics, sad.

I remember when the local paper put out a morning and as evening edition. Of course this is 60 years ago. There was radio but tv was just getting started so the paper was where all the information was.

I used to be a paper boy first for the morning paper then for the afternoon paper. I had that paper route well into the 70s. Of course by 1980, the afternoon paper was dead.

Come to think of it, I don’t think paper boys/girls exist anymore.

I remember when the Sunday comic section was huge. It was terrific to read all those comics. It had a picture of Puck and the quotation “Lord, what fools these mortals be.”

Hey Pat? Where are you? Been a while…