As long as we have fanciful tales masquerading as true instances of actual survival on this site, I don't think we have a leg to stand on. We are no better than any other media outlet.

News is a business where advertisers are the clients. Above all else, news must be entertaining and simple to keep the attention of consumers who will buy the advertised products. In the past, media outlets didn't have to compete with the Internet. Nowadays, anybody with a little money can put up a website and be a competitor of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc.

Related story, I bought about 5 different local newspapers the other day. Are these things getting thin or what? I guess few people read newspapers anymore...sigh.

People often look at me as if Im insane when I tell them I do not watch the news. Im Happy to find so many here think of it the same as I do.

Montanero:

and...
Ireckon:

That's the hollow-headed, knee-jerk thinking of big business, with the usual short-term follow-through, resulting in...



People don't trust the news sources, so they don't pay attention to them. So, to keep the advertising coming in, they regress to news bytes on dimwitted, drunken/drugged, promiscuous pseudo-celebrities whose names a thinking person wouldn't recognize, catering only to the people whose reading consists of the National Inquirer and comic books.

In the words of a young boy from Arkansas: whoopeedooooodoooo! With the emphasis on the doo-doo.

Sue

I an olde guy, and set in my ways. I still subscribe to a morning paper (actually a fairly superior one, the LA Times) and begin the day by reading it cover to cover, a habit i have cultivated for years because a lot of times it paid to trot off to work informed and knowledgeable.

Conventional papers are definitely waning. More and more I read news online. I gave up on conventional TV news years ago. I do find NPR a fairly credible news source.

Any news should be taken cautiously. In the rush to present the story, important details are often overlooked, and critical relationships are not explored. I have seen that all too often where I indeed have independent, credible information.

Over the years I've come to realize the importance of history in understanding the present because on a macro scale the past really does repeat itself, over and over and over. So IMO, the more you know of history, the easier it is to make sense of the present, weed out reliable media sources, avoid being swayed by propaganda or agendas, etc. The sad fact is that humans have changed very little over the last 100 years. Well, at least we're consistent.

Well, there is satire, then there is apparently American television news.

in the early 70s I spent some time in the Far East as an enlisted USAFSS type...although I picked up a little of the language, did not learn to read Japanese, Tagalog, or Thai... relied on the Christian Science Monitor (no religious affiliation)for what I perceived as an unbiased news source...used it for situational awareness especially in the Philippines and Thailand

I just remembered that the news channels have picked up stories from the onion news network before....Talk about flat out sad state of the news right there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion

Around the bottom has the events.

Even worse, so many newspapers simply print the majority of their articles from the wire services because they can't afford to have their own reporters to go and cover stories, so many newspapers are basically printing the same stories as each other. Which wouldn't be so bad if the wire services themselves still had top notch journalists like they used to but they are also under financial pressure to keep costs down and churn out stories quickly for 24/7 news coverage.