Getting Your News from Multiple Sources

Are you informed on what’s going on in your city? What about province/state? How about your country? Do you know what’s going on with big name issues around the world?

If you can’t answer ‘Somewhat’ (or ‘Yes’) to all of those, you need to start getting more informed of your surroundings. They matter. They matter a lot.

Now, for those of you who at least have an idea of what’s going on at every one of those levels, how do you know that the information you have is accurate? Common answers might be ‘Well, I watch the news.’, or ‘I read blog posts/journals/newspapers.’, or even ‘I listen to the radio’. Ok, good for you. But that doesn’t mean that what you learned from those sources are correct. Here is an excerpt from an article on globalissues.org entitled Media in the United States:

It is normally thought — and expected — that US press freedom would rank top in the world. Yet, for many years, it has been a lot lower than the high expectation. For 2011, the US ranked just 47th.

Also from the same article:

Media omissions, distortion, inaccuracy and bias in the US is something acknowledged by many outside the USA, and is slowly realized more and more inside the US.

As someone not from the US (Canada in my case), this is a pretty accurate statement. Taking these issues into account, it would seem that getting news from more sources so that I can come to my own conclusion is a good way to remain informed and to reduce the bias of my opinion and interpretation of the news.

So with this approach in mind, here are some easy sources (read ‘YouTube’) that specifically provide contradicting or questioning views to those of some of your major networks:

• The Philip DeFranco Show: Phil posts one video every Monday - Thursday, and talks about mostly big international events or events pertinent to the US. For most situations that can instill bias, he often notes right upfront that he has an opinion on the matter and either that he will not state that opinion so as not bias his viewers, or explains his position and why he stands by it. He also very regularly questions and analyzes large media outlets and tries to play devil’s advocate.

• SourceFed: Started almost 3 years ago by Philip DeFranco, SourceFed is a group of young adults gathering information about stories ranging from wacky and ‘WTF’ worthy news to important national (US) and international news. They post 5 news videos every day from Monday - Thursday. The commentary and opinions are similar to the PDS, but it is still a good alternate source.

• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: I’ve become a big fan of the clips posted on this YouTube channel. John Oliver always delivers several good laughs, while at the same time addressing very serious issues. Coming from England (read ‘not from the US’), he finds it very easy to question the things that many people in the US take for granted and view as normal. Recently, he released a video about US drone strikes in the middle east and how terrifying it is that not only does the public not know much about the drone program’s regulations and statistics, even the government officials are very often missing information that most people would consider crucial in making decisions for these strikes.

• The Vlog Brothers: If you don’t know who John and Hank Green are yet, then you need to get out from underneath the rock you’ve been living under. John and Hank Green are celebrities among even the YouTube elite. What started out as a channel used simply to keep in contact, these brothers now use the channel to bring to light many issues. Most of these issues are world issues, and a large majority of those are efforts to aid Africa. Each of them releases one video per week (all on the same channel) in which they question everything, and the videos are (almost) always under 4 minutes.

• VICE News: VICE News covers everything about the world. They have videos ranging from sub one minute shorts to several hour long documentaries. Their reporters travel around the world to areas ravaged by war, famine, disease and more where they create videos putting on display the conditions and situations that people in these regions live in. While I personally don’t watch many VICE videos (I simply don’t have the time or patience to watch the long videos), I would highly recommend their channel to keep up to date on world news.

• Some more satirical sources that still provide and interesting (and valuable) alternate view on many topics include The Colbert Report and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Both of these are Comedy Central shows, and both of these are satirical shows, so you should definitely take what they say with a grain of salt, but they sometimes have some very eye-opening and shock-worthy shorts addressing some serious issues.

These news sources might be a good supplement to your current means of keeping up to date on your surroundings. By no means am I saying that you should drop all of your current news sources and use only these. My suggestion is to begin by watching some of the news put out by these sources, and then use this new intake of sources to evaluate all of your current sources and trim the fat where necessary, so to speak.

Also keep in mind that there are many other good news sources as well. The ones I’ve listed are only a subset of what’s available. On the other end of the spectrum, because there are so many news sources, there are obviously some bad ones. Here’s a short list of news sources from which you’ll probably want to do some fact checking:

• Fox News: This one is a clear winner. They’ve been known to be a very conservative news source that often reports only on stories that fit their viewpoint, and in cases where the story is too big to ignore, there have been some documented cases of them reporting flat out incorrect facts (potentially as much as 60% of the time). At best, it’s poor reporting, at worst, it’s blatant misrepresentation. Fox News themselves have been in the news recently for more than a few insensitive or discriminatory remarks. Not all of the anchors and reporters for Fox News are bad, but as a general rule, take everthing they say with a grain of salt.

• The New York Times: A little less known for misrepresentation than Fox News, but again, there have been a few cases where they’ve been caught printing incorrect or dishonest facts, especially when being first to report on the subject is at the forefront of their business model. They’ve been caught making up statistics or omitting important pieces of information relevant to the stories they publish simply to be first to market with the story.

• The Onion: It’s surprising how many people see the titles of their articles, or read the full articles themselves and believe the contents. The Onion is a satirical, completely fake, news source. Don’t believe the contents of their articles. It is intended to be fake, and to be a joke. Here’s a quote from the Wikipedia article about the site:

The Onion is an American digital media company and news satire organization.

While most (if not all) of the sources I’ve listed (good or bad) often report on US news, this may not be of importance to you. There are many many alternative news sources on YouTube, television, or elsewhere on the Internet. Find them. They will be useful to you.

I am by no means an extremely informed person, but I do take pride in the fact that because I use multiple news sources and can compare the ‘facts’ presented by all of them, I can come to my own conclusions about many issues at every level from local to worldwide.

If you have any additional sources that you think people (including myself) should check out, please post them in the comments.