Then here is the $64,000 question (ask your parents, maybe grandparents)
Where should a person get information to make decisions?
A newswire?
Becoming a subject semi expert and formulating an ideology from whichwe don’t vary too far?
Wiki it? lol
Learn history and assume the subject has happened before?
Don’t bother and say que sera, sera?
I think your best bet is to look at the source material if it’s a topic you can interpret yourself. For example, don’t read about the House Benghazi panel. Watch the video(s) and/or read the transcript. Don’t rely on the NYT or Breitbart to interpret the proceeding for you.
If it’s a topic above your head, read what experts have to say about it not what the NYT or Breitbart think the experts think about it.
Finally, mix up your sources. I like The Hill and Business Insider. One leans left the other leans right, but they’re more middle of the road than many others. I’ve stopped even looking at places like Breitbart, The Blaze, Salon, etc… They’re crap.
I like your thoùght process, but in the end, there is only so much time to distill subjects.
Sad commentary
We are awash in rapidly changing information with a dearth of truth. Like the proverbial shipwrecked sailor, we are dying of thirst while floating on an ocean of water
I mean, this kinda sounds like what people say when they just don’t have time to work out…
We all have access to the same information. Its up to us to filter and interpret. I see people filling up social media daily with ridiculous news pieces from fringe media circuits to confirm their personal bias. All I have to do is look at that and take it for what its worth. Its not like if I read a piece from Breitbart I’m suddenly an alt-right white nationalist. I just use my brain…
I agree, but why read an article written by Strongy McStrongerson when you can read an article written by Jim Wendler?
Yes of course we still have the ability to pick and choose our sources haha… Just saying if I was “accidentally” exposed to a highly biased newspiece, I think I’d be able to safely weed out the bullcrap
Lol, ya, but you’re also intelligent…
Because Wendler says I am an expert at lifting 1000# on my back, has done it, and then tells how he got there. It is objective and each of you may have spent 1000s of hours involved in strength.
Writers are also telling you they are Wendler, but it is subjective. My case - Gen Joe Blow is former director of army intelligence gets on TV and says a,b,c. Adm John Doe is former director of naval intelligence comes on different channel and says NO it is x,y,z.
TV guy comes on and says Trump grabs pussy… Damnation 
Sure, but this isn’t really the same as the silly example I wrote. This is more like Amit & Wendler disagreeing based on their knowledge and experience. That happens of course. I’m glad it does!
Lol
He had good reason to hate the media. They made his life miserable printing smut about him. Of course they did it to everybody. Poor John Adams took a beating at hands of the media at the encouragement of Jefferson, but when they turned their guns on him, he did not like it none too much at all.
Ah to have our choices be John Adams or Thomas Jefferson for president! They were different, they had their faults, but they were good leaders. I guess they had to be. The “American experiment” was at least in part, their baby.
Monica Crowley quoting Pew Research
1964 - 94% of Whitehouse correspondents voted Democrat.
I was unaware of that huge of a disparity so long ago.
NYT recycling 1981 allegation of Sen Sessions racism, that’s 35 years folks and the questioning was done by none other than scumbag Ted Kennedy
@anon71262119 - this is what I am talking about MSM
Point made, Treco. Most of the academics I live around and work with are reading the NYT and The New Yorker, or the more local LA Times, none of which prepared them for the election results. People are still in shock here.
NO wonder there’s such a divide. People on each side of the political spectrum are reading/ listening to completely different news.
I read a nice article by WSJ writer, Bret Stephens, who has been relentlessly critical of Trump and has taken some heat for that. He quoted Arthur Miller who said, “A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.” Then Stephens said, “A responsible columnist is a companion talking back to you. To talk is not to echo.”
I don’t think you’ll hit a paywall for this one, if you’re curious. He’s rightly critical of some of the propaganda and agit-prop sites that have become so popular, and I liked this quote, “Independent judgement should also mean an occasional countervailing view, especially when it runs against the grain of a reader’s thinking.”
Paywalled.
Knew but had forgotten
WSJ considered fairest reporter of news in survey
Owned by Murdoch, just like the infamous Fox News :7)
Sorry. It wasn’t locked down this morning. I got to it without logging in. Weird. Some of their content is open to nonsubscribers. Anyway, I will copy and past it here for ya when I get a chance.
Weird. I was able to get to it without logging in this time.
Here it is if you still want to read it, Treco. A Columnist’s Responsibility
In an age of political propaganda, readers deserve independent judgment.
In 2008 and 2012 I wrote columns opposing Barack Obama’s bid for the White House. I thought he was an overrated talker grandiosely promising the transformation and redemption of an America that needed neither. The cult of personality that went with his candidacy creeped me out. People who wore T-shirts with the candidate posed as a prophet reminded me of religious believers, not democratic citizens.
I’ve never regretted my opposition to Mr. Obama, though I’ve never wished him ill. Nor do I regret other positions that earned me no favors from readers, from my opposition to Jonathan Pollard’s early release to my support for keeping troops in Afghanistan (for which the journalist Michael Wolff urged people to punch me in the face). There are columnists who take excellent care to stay on their audience’s good side. Not me.
But nothing quite prepared me for the torrent of opprobrium stemming from my undiminished disdain for Donald Trump. In August 2015 I called him a “loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians.” Last week, I said he was a demagogue. I’ve lost count of the number of readers informing me—usually more than once—that they’ve canceled subscriptions on my account, or demanding that I apologize, resign or move to Israel. His victory last week has redoubled those demands.
To which my considered reply is: Non, je ne regrette rien.
Well, not entirely. I was almost certain Mr. Trump would lose the election. Nobody should ever hire me as a political forecaster. I took too many shots at Mr. Trump’s voters rather than at the candidate himself. Millions of voters in the general election were not blind to his faults but chose him as the lesser evil. They deserved less scorn and more understanding.
The incoming Trump administration also deserves an open mind, as Hillary Clinton graciously put it in her concession speech. It should be a rule in democracies that candidates for high office should be judged guilty till proven innocent, while the winners deserve to be held innocent till proven guilty. To root for Mr. Trump to fail is worse than unpatriotic. It’s self-defeating.
But let’s get a few things straight. Winning an election doesn’t win an argument. Team Trump is not Team America. Modesty always becomes a political victor, especially one who lost the popular vote by a historic margin. And the question most appropriate for Mr. Trump and his supporters isn’t what his defeated critics owe him. It’s what he owes them as their highest political servant.
Something else: What a columnist owes his readers isn’t a bid for their constant agreement. It’s independent judgment. Opinion journalism is still journalism, not agitprop. The elision of that distinction and the rise of malevolent propaganda outfits such as Breitbart News is one of the most baleful trends of modern life. Serious columnists must resist it.
Independent judgment should also mean an occasional countervailing view, especially when it runs against the grain of readers’ thinking. “It is the true believer’s ability to ‘shut his eyes and stop his ears’ to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard,” wrote Eric Hoffer in 1951, “which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy.”
Many things explain Mr. Trump’s unexpected victory, but not the least of them was the ability of his core supporters to shut out the inconvenient Trump facts: the precarious foundations of his wealth, the plasticity of his convictions, the astonishing frequency of his lying. Mr. Trump attracted millions of voters thirsty to believe. That thirst may hold its own truth, but it doesn’t lessen a columnist’s responsibility to note that it won’t be slaked by another hollow slogan of redemption. “Make America Great Again” will go the way of “Hope and Change.” Whether or not this disappointment gives way to wisdom is another question.
One last thing: Columnists owe their readers a moral voice. In appointing Steve Bannon as top strategist, it might be said that Mr. Trump is balancing the establishment and insurgent forces that supported him. But the significant fact is that Mr. Bannon presided over a website that delighted in calling Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew,” said of Anne Applebaum that “hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned,” and defended the Confederacy as a “patriotic and idealistic cause.” If get-in-line Republican leaders won’t call Mr. Bannon out on this, it falls to the columnists they likely read to do so.
“A good newspaper,” Arthur Miller said, “is a nation talking to itself.” A responsible columnist, I would add, is a companion talking back to you. To talk is not to echo.
Thanks for the post.
I hit a paywall as well … luckily, as a trick I learned in boy scouts, there is a rather expedient work around … copy the headline of the article and paste it into google. click on the link and wha-la … easy access to any article.
Have fun non-subscribers.