Searching for a source of news

One question has been on my mind a lot in the past few years: How should I get my news in order to know what is really going on? The main stream news outlets seem to be more interested in entertainment and political rhetoric than actually getting relevant news out to the people. Much of this is connected to the wider issue of our country seeming to be constantly “dumbing down” and ignoring rigorous thought and education in favor of fast-facts that don't challenge anyone's perceptions, but that is perhaps for another post.

I suppose that first I should look over my own news habits. I am one of those twenty-to-thirty somethings that watch the Daily Show on Comedy Central, and indeed get much of my news through that show. My oldest habitually used source of news is probably Slashdot, a news aggregation website that caters more towards the open-source and computer-geek crowd. Also I have been following the BBC for a while, and prefer it to most American news agencies because they give a bit more of an international slant and cover more world events; after all I'll hear about the big American news stories from classmates, from friends, or from parents.

More recently, in the past year or so, I've been using RSS links to various news sites to get an overview of what is going on in the world. I subscribe to one RSS feed that is a general aggregater for mainstream news stories, the BBC World RSS feed, and the RSS feed for Al Jazeera: English to try to get a wider perspective on what is going on in the world, especially the Middle East. Even more recently I've added a feed to France 24, although I don't follow stories from that feed as often, as they seem to be a bit less in-depth than over news agencies. Finally my last two sources for information are Google, and Wikipidia when I want to find out things on a particular subject.

In many ways my reliance on the internet to find my news allows me to control how I receive my news about the world, and over-all I believe that to be a good thing as I try to gain a wide understanding. However, it also brings up the pitfall of my selecting out only those stories that I want to read and know about, rather than those stories that I should read and know about. News aggregation tools can be very powerful and helpful to gather and sort out what is going on in the world, but can also lead to a view that is always skewed to one's own beliefs. In the end I believe that it is a moral burden of modern life that one must examine where you get your news sources and check those sources against others.