Where do you get your news?

I used to teach Freshman Composition at the college level. 

One of the first things I taught was the difference between a fact, an inference and a judgment.

The textbook I used had a great example. Uncle Joe was smoking a cigar, standing next to a Christmas tree in the living room.

You walk past Uncle Joe, into the dining room where all the other family members are gathered. A  few minutes later you notice smoke coming from the living room. There's a fire. But, thankfully it was caught quickly and only the Christmas tree was damaged.

In the episode's aftermath, family members, all of them having been in the dining room, gather round. They try to make sense of what happened. One says, "I saw Uncle Joe standing next to the Christmas tree, smoking a cigar." (Fact) 

Another person pipes in, "Yes, and his cigar probably lit the tree on fire." (Inference)

To which yet another member of the family concludes, "He shouldn't be allowed to smoke in the house. He's so careless." (Judgment).

Using this example, it's fairly easy to determine where the logic broke down to get to the point of accusing Uncle Joe of being careless.

Note that although we have placed Uncle Joe at the scene of the burning Christmas tree, we don't have anything except circumstantial evidence. The reality is, any number of things could have caused the tree to catch fire. Like exposed wiring along the string of Christmas tree lights.

While the above example may seem easy to follow, most others in real life are not.

A few decades ago, in the United States, there were three nightly television newscasts (ABC, CBS and NBC). And almost every decent-sized town had its own daily newspaper that picked up national and international news from a small number of sources (AP, UPI or one of a few national dailies' services). These daily newspapers offered much more, background detail to offer additional understanding.

As a teenager, I worked in one of those mid-sized city newsrooms. 

My job was to clear the newswires (teletype machines) on a regular basis, sort the stories by content and then drop them off to appropriate copy editors. This was before there were computers.

My point is there were a limited number of news sources for national or international news. So, outside of opinion pieces, there wasn't much diversion in details. And there wasn't much chance of a fact morphing into an opinion (judgment) on the news page.

Fast forward to today and it's a completely different situation. 

There are hundreds of sources for national and international news. There has been a proliferation of broadcast news sources, ranging from ultra-conservative to ultra-liberal. That in itself isn't necessarily a horrible thing. But it does give us the chance to pick and choose our news with an astonishing ability to become increasingly narrow-minded. To the point of never having our news cross-referenced for accuracy. 

It becomes easy to gloss over the difference between fact, inference and judgment and as the competition has greatly increased, news media have become very good at marketing their versions of the events of the day. Commenting on this, in the AARP Bulletin, Ted Koppel lamented: "Too much of the media looks upon their goal as giving the public what it wants."

You would think that Christian news would be immune to this situation. But it isn't.

I've read seemingly solid writing from sources, that, upon second glance, began to show cracks in logic. With the explosion in social media, among bloggers and websites and ministries, it's truly becoming an intellectual minefield, upon which readers need to tread carefully.

What's the solution?

1. Be aware of the source of the information you are reading. Search news archives to see if the sources you are using have a political agenda. (Politically motivated reporting isn't really news reporting, it's opinion-giving, so it's often opining).

2. If you want to grasp a national or international issue, you'll need to spend time getting your information from a variety of solid news sources. (Even to the point of checking to see how other news media, outside of the US, cover a story).

3. Don't rely on television/cable/radio talk show hosts or bloggers as primary news sources. The best/most honest of them freely admit they are not newscasters, only offering their slant on the news.

What do you think? Where do you get your news? 

Does your news source entertain, or inform you? 

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