Have you ever been seriously disenchanted with a major media source?

I’m seriously disenchanted with major media. Period.

Not any single source as much as the lack of Journalistic ability at all these days.

Seems like almost everyone is simply reporting their bias. In order to trust anything I read, I feel I pretty much need to investigate and confirm all of the salient points myself.

Of course, I don’t have time for that. So I pretty much just figure that the majority of reporting is either complete spin or unfounded conjecture and let it go.

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If I see something reported that perfectly jibes with my own preconceived notion, then I’m doubly suspicious.

If it ever existed, the days of unbiased journalism appear to be over. All of the major news agencies infect their reporting with a spin that reflects the bias of their managers, owners, and/or funding.

No media source in Mexico can be relied upon. They are either in someone’s pocket, or under threat.

I actually think that Fluther and other crowdsourcing news reporting experiments are much more important information sources, and hopefully will grow in time.

Tangent:

It seems that scientific research is maybe even worse off. All research must be funded. To get those grants (or employment) one must attempt to meet the expectations of those providing the funds.

There’s almost no pure research simply for knowledge’s sake these days. It’s all to meet an agenda.

@robmandu

And with the entire global warming debacle, even some pure research can be countered with funded contrary research.

I stopped reading TIME years ago. They stopped reporting information and started reporting ‘stories’ like this and I lost interest.

I get annoyed at New Scientist now and then, but never enough to stop reading it, and when I read something stupid, there is usually a clarification or a correction in the next issue.

Every media outlet is so ridiculously biased in one way or another that it makes me think there are no real journalists anymore.

I don’t trust any media news outlet as far as I can throw them.

Yeah. The internet. 10 years ago I was amazed with it – free information! on any topic I’m interested in! Now its still there, but to get it, I have to wade through blogs of neckbeards spouting righteous indignation and five lady gaga parody videos.

The media is in serious trouble. Something new has to emerge, but we have to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Once upon a time, every town had a newspaper that was independent and published the news it felt would interest its local base. Each paper had its own reporters, researchers, editors and investigative journalists. Then bit by bit, corporate consolidation cut away at the independent press. Now, there are only a handful of companies that own the media. They are all massive multinational corporations with an agenda that has absolutely nothing to do with the local populous their various outlets serve, or even the national interests of any one nation state. To maximize profits, they have sacked local staffs and replaced them with a small, corporate pool that feeds releases to all their outlets. Those releases are the news the media moguls want you to hear.

We are watching dead-tree media die. Newspapers and magazines used to be the truth police. Their independent investigative journalistic staffs could quickly debunk and beat down false stories. They’re going, going, gone. Now, phony stories can be planted on blogs, circulated by email to a few million people with some fringe agenda, and thereby driven straight into the 24 hour news cycle. By the time some sane folks get around to tracking down the big lie and shooting it, it’s become a zombie. So many people have heard it and believed it that it rises up again and again no matter how often it gets shot down.

Is this the world we want? Can we become sophisticated enough as consumers of the new media to be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff? I don’t know. I haven’t seen it happen yet. Right now, it takes hard work and time to gather all the news that’s fit to print. Most Americans don’t want to invest the time and energy required.

I can only hope that some standards of truth and responsibility will emerge in the new media, and that true investigative journalism will be resurrected in the new formats.

The LA Times is crap.

“Why Israel doesn’t care about peace”. Well, I see we’ve gotten off to a good, solid start…

I dumped Time back in ‘99 or so. It got to the point were I could feel the dumbing down coming harder with each issue.