Scandals and the media

Ever since  large newspaper has been buying other large paper and you realize that in North America there are only a handful of different news outlets, I've had a distrust of the news.  You only get to hear what this particular news outlet has decided you will hear.  Getting two sides of a story is harder to find unless you dig really deep. In some ways the internet is good for that because it gives you access to all different news media.

I had a Facebook friend recently comment that he tends to learn things when he reads the BBC or even AlJazeerah English, but he doesn't learn so much when he reads North American media. I'm not in complete agreement, I still find some Canadian news sources acceptable, but overall I am in agreement as I've been staying away from American news outlets for a while. It's all the same rehashed views.

When you look at some countries in the Middle East like Libya, Syria, just to name a few, the news outlets of those countries are even more tightly controlled. People in some countries are hard pressed to find anything else to read other then the party line. We've seen in the west how Syrian SANA stamped news stories differ greatly from what people on the ground have to say.  The middle east isn't the only place where the news is tightly controlled. I'm sure if the Chinese government doesn't want us to know things, we never find out about them either.

It's kind of ironic in this day and age of globalization, the internet and Facebook, where in theory we should be more aware of what goes on elsewhere in the world and in some ways we're just as backward because the news we get to read isn't always the only news but it's the only one "those in power" think we should be reading. 

Here's hoping that the scandal involving phone hacking of victims by Rupert Murdock employees changes some of the way news media operates and perhaps puts back a bit of honesty in the game. At the moment this scandal is like a runaway train. No one knows how much damage it will do or where it will stop, as this article demonstrates.  Right now it's having a catastrophic effect in Britain.