How Do You Know What You Know?

Empirical data?  Facts from history? How you know what you know?

Have you ever stopped to think of how you’ve come to know your world?  How you know everything from the results of our wars to who the bad guys and good guys are around the in Washington.  How did you find out what foods would hurt you and which are healthiest?  Or even what movies are good or which colleges are the best?  Who told you these things since you were born right up to this very day?

We did.  The news media.  Newspaper writers and radio and TV newspeople.  Journalists who, for the most part with some exceptions, take pride in delivering straightforward, honest information to you, the public.

The lines have long ago been blurred between real journalism and sensational, over-hyped shows when Hard Copy and the like came to be.  Then, entertainment and journalism blended a bit, and young media consumers went to MTV for their ‘facts’.  Now it’s comedy shows like The Daily Show and Steven Colbert stealing some of you away from ‘real’ news.

But there has never been a time in recent history that you had so little legitimate news to choose from.  Now you get your information from a media that is clearly leaning one way or the other.  Young people have accepted a bias in the media because they have never seen it any other way.

Here’s how it changed: generally speaking if journalists were either ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ years ago, it was because they were, as individuals, liberal or conservative. Not because they had pressure from their media bosses to be one or the other.  It would be fair to say that a couple of decades ago, a young journalist was more apt to be liberal socially than an older writer or anchor. I’d also say newspaper writers were a bit more liberal than radio or TV news people. Not because they worked for a paper or a station,  but because of who they were socially.  For example in 1990 you’d never see a hippie anchoring the evening news, but he might be a great writer for an alternative weekly newspaper.  Am I stereotyping?  Of course. But I’m sure research would prove this to be the case.

So news media was far from perfect years ago, but at least journalists generally got in the business to dish out fair reporting and if they were good they keep their jobs for as long as there was news to write.

Now, there is little doubt in most of your minds that certain media outlets lean certain ways.  The local newspaper, talk radio, public radio, TV networks, you now know how each of them ‘leans’.  It’s all but out in the open these days, and the real losers in the game are you the viewers and readers and listeners.  Because this isn’t about to be fixed anytime soon.  Reporters who want to be fair often have very little career options.  Chances are the biased reporting will only get worse, and people will have to play along to stay employed and feed their families.

So what do we do about the current state of the media?  CAN we do anything?  After all, haven’t most of us have already started using a variety of sources to figure out basically what we need to know about life?  Not to mention that media is evolving.  It’s an age where social networks are more popular than TV networks.  Many of you are using trusted blogs and websites to stay informed. Some have found a trusted news source and they should cherish the find. Others are still searching.

As you search for the trusted broadcast host or newspaper writer…as you peruse websites and blogs for tidbits you can trust, remember this:  virtually everything we think we know about the world was told to us by someone in the news media.

So choose wisely.

Jim Parisi
The Jim Parisi Show