Thoughts on Fox, Blogs, Media Impartiality
Having long-since dropped CNN and the networks from my list of primary news sources, I've decided that I like transparency of idealogy in my news sources.

The old model was based on a premise that journalists could divorce themselves from their own personal idealogies and bias, and report the news as if they had none. While some have successfully built solid journalism careers out of this approach, it is fundamentally flawed from both the producer and consumer sides of the equation.

From the producer side, keeping personal biases out of the story is terribly difficult. Even when stories are wordsmithed in a non-biased manner, the paradigm on which the story is founded is often a product of the internal beliefs of the author, even if the author doesn't realize it. Beyond that angle, the choice of stories on which to focus one's journalistic intentions is influenced by what a reporter believes is important or relevant.

From the consumers' perspective, a belief that their sources of news information are impartial, or more fundamentally that a human being is even capable of removing all personal bias from his profession as a conveyor of information, causes them to put more trust than they should in established sources. This not only leaves them open to unintentional bias that is almost impossible to completely remove from journalism, but to the intentional bias that is certain to creep into a journalistic paradigm that cloaks itself in mythical impartiality.

The rising paradigm is one in which people gather their information from sources about which they know from the outset their basic beliefs and idealogies. By removing the misleading shroud of impartiality from information sources, the reporter is now free to speak his mind without compromising a nearly impossible ideal, and the consumer is able to seek different angles on the same story and view them through his own idealogical prism in order to form a truly informed perspective. I think that this represents a positive step toward the goal of a better educated population.
- served up by Nomad @ 5:47 PM