Wednesday, September 17, 2014

About the news

I am on the fence about the news and media in general.

I don't trust journalists to tell the whole story, they invariably have their own opinions, the goals and views of their publishing network to consider, and the fact that if their stories don't sell, they don't get to keep their jobs, which means they need to more and more appeal to a public that is hungry for sensationalism.

I got burned by one of those sensationalized newspaper-selling stories, and to this day, I can't read a newspaper article without questioning what I'm not being told, or whose story isn't being heard.

And so, for the most part, unless I hear about some huge catastrophe, I ignore the news. And I live a happy, peaceful life.

But a niggling part of me thinks that I might be missing out on something. For instance, I didn't know there was such a thing as "herbivore men" or that it was an emerging concept in Japan. This is something I would be interested in reading.

So my question is: where do you find the good (interesting, not sensationalized) informational news about what is happening in the world today?

Do I have to go trolling through blogs until I find a writer I trust, and then further troll through the comments for people who are somehow miraculously up-to-date on the weird and wonderful things that are happening in various cultures around the world and pick up those bread crumbs?

Did I just set myself a task of reading through millions of blogs and comments to find the people who have interesting and informational thoughts? That seems like a lot of work for something that I really only notice I miss about three times a year.