Truly Fair & Balanced
Posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 13:08.
I get nearly all of my news online. I only pick up a newspaper to play Sudoku and I don’t watch television regularly. I recognize the value of being an informed participant in the world, but don’t like to sift through the opinions anymore.
While I enjoy it, FOX News Channel is biased. Other news outlets are biased equally, and worse, poorly implement FNC-style tactics while making accusations of bias.
I tried to balance the mass media bias by subscribing to the XML feeds of a large quantity of news outlets. My NetNewsWire was overwhelmed with AP, Reuters, BBC, FOX, and more. Every update resulted in hundreds of stories, many similar or duplicates.
I became frustrated with the narrow breadth of the news. Granted, the scope was better than BBC World News, which I watched hopelessly in Nicaragua for two-weeks over winter break. The channel ran the same three headline stories repeatedly, only interrupted by weather and American entertainment news. I still fail to understand why celebrities having babies in Africa is important to everyone in the world. or anyone at all.
“Surely, there has to be one unbiased news outlet with some scope,” I thought. I dropped the XML feeds and tried Drudge for a few weeks.
When Drudge only posted links to stories critical of Al Gore’s phenomenal An Inconvenient Truth, I looked to PBS to be my BBC. News Hour is so undeveloped that I question why PBS even tries.
Then, I Googled for awhile and found The Epoch Times. While the writing is great and seemingly more independent, the coverage was not that as diverse.
While Googling, I decided to visit Google News, which is a wonderful assortment of every major news outlet prioritized by algorithms and delivered in an Atom XML feed. The site categorizes similar stories under a single headline. The scope is satisfactory and the ability to read the same story from several sources at once is convenient.
I’ll get my news from Google for now.
Backblog: July 28, 2006
