News

Subject: News

When I was growing up newspapers were the main method of gaining news. It was before the time of rolling 24 hours news which now flows, unimpeded into our homes each day through the television. Back then the news was predominately a presentation of what had happen or what had been said and we the reader were left to make up our own minds as to its importance.
Today the scene is very different. The actual news incident is placed in the background and we are instead prone to a tirade of commentary from the titans on our screens, personalities who have become bigger personalities than the ones reported on in the news.
So what we have is a potted variety of information, information regurgitated by the commentator, information scanned and assimilated according to editorial diktat. "Brain washing" would not be too strong a word for the news which is presented these days. Scepticism is never far away from the reporting on the pronouncements of certain leaders or the politics of certain countries. The slanted reporting and the guest speakers who's opinions are sort out to enhance the editorial view. The news has become a football kicked from one half to the other as a treat or an opportunity, depending on which side you fall. The phenomenon of 'false news'  adds to the mix, where powerful organisations creat their own version of the news and feed it to us via the internet and the many media players who use it to peddle their ideas.
The days of a report being written of a battleship holed up in a harbour in South America  and sent to a news room to be typeset and rushed still wet, printed and packaged under the papers banner which under some editorial/owner control once stood for the ethics of the paper and its veracity.
Today it's a scramble for lurid headlines. The truth comes way down the list of priorities and the attention span of most people has gone down with it. News flies thick and fast and the choice of which story to tell becomes another tool in the ability to manufacture opinion.
I believe you must choose your sources of information and by that I don't mean listen and read only what you wanted to hear. Choose from a range of different sources, the BBC as well as Sky, RT as well as Al Jezeera, the Turkish station TRT and NAK the strange Japanese. English language TV Station. They all have their own slant, their own proclivity, their own way of presenting the world through often ideologically tinted glasses.
Of course there are those of you who would utter, why bother, it's news, stories about other people and their success or failure. It has no relevance to my life and what's more because I can't effect what's going on i don't care.
My own view is that knowledge is a gift, a gift which repays and keeps repaying. You might not have all the answers but for your own mental wellbeing, to have an opinion which  is founded on as close to fact as you can get, is remarkably satisfying.