N is for News

I’m a news junkie. Well, technically, I’m an information junkie who gets his initial fix through the news. Over the years, I’ve developed and refined an approach to news and information that has served me well. It has two parts: The filter and the digger.

The filter is fairly simple. I read a story on the site of a mainstream news organisation and ask myself, “does this story sound like it could be true or mostly true?” Most stories from the mainstream newsmedia pass this test. Next I ask, “Based on the preponderance of evidence, is this story likely to be true?” This is where many news stories fall, because the story doesn’t answer some key questions.

For example, if I read a story about a scientific study, I’ll ask myself, “who has something to gain?” If it looks to me as if a particular industry stands to gain by the study being believed, I assume there could be a P.R. angle at work.

When evaluating news, obviously no one can know everything about every subject. However, intelligence counts far more than specific knowledge. As I often say, these days no one needs to know anything—they can just Google it. The trick is knowing who and what information to trust.

What I do, especially for important stories, is I enter the digger phase: I trace everything back to the original source. For example, suppose I read a blog where someone comments on some figures in the news. I go to the news site they link to, and it’s an amalgamator site, that is, a site that reprints other people’s news. I see who the original source was, say, a major newspaper. I go there. That story mentions facts that came from a government study, so I Google the title of the study. THEN I can look at the real information, unfiltered by newsmedia or blogger bias.

This is WAY too much time and effort for most people, and even for me much of the time, which is why I only blog about a tiny fraction of the stuff that interests me—I just don’t have time to chase down the original sources. That’s a pity, really, because I think the world would be a better place if more people refused to take others’ interpretation of things as fact without checking the original source first.

All of us—me included—sometimes place too much reliance on information from sites we may be ideologically in tune with, more or less. The problem, of course, is that they have an agenda to promote. So, most of us have little choice, in our time-strapped lives, but to get our information first from the mainstream newsmedia.

While news can be informing, consuming it does not make us informed. Instead, we need to dig deeper: We need to find the news ourselves. If  more of us did, that would be news in itself.

Here’s one of my recent blog posts with a video showing how news coverage evolves these days.

The image accompanying this post has been released into the public domain.

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