Today Melanie asks us to discuss our opinions on news and whether we can trust it or not.

What is your honest opinion of the news and how it is shared right now? 
Are we being informed or fed Pablum designed to keep us uninformed and in the dark?

Truthful Tuesday

Reading this question prompted me to search online to see which news sources are considered the most unbiased. I have done this in the past but things change from time to time.

As I have often mentioned, I try to keep abreast of the main stories but I don’t want to be consumed with worry which I would be if I constantly read or watched the news. I don’t usually watch live news programs at all although I will cherry pick snippets I’m interested in on YouTube from various sources. I try to stay away from YouTubers who have an extreme bias one way or the other and just go to professional news media. Mostly though I prefer to read the news first although I do like to listen to the early morning news on the radio when I wake up.

For Australian content I tend to like our ABC or SBS rather than the Murdoch media. I also often read articles from The Guardian, BBC and Sydney Morning Herald. The ABC website includes a Fact Check section which I often refer to.

None of these sources are completely unbiased of course. That is nearly impossible. Anyway, I found an article labelled “15 Most Unbiased News Sources” on a website called TechPresident. I am not familiar with the site; but because of some spelling and grammatical errors I think it might be run by non English speakers (or people who don’t proofread). I can’t vouch for them but this is their list.

https://techpresident.com/unbiased-news-sources/,

I am going to check out some of the links in this list because I would love to read news that is reported in a balanced way. One of the sources mentioned is PBS News which I am familiar with as it is shown in Australia, usually a couple of days late but the stories are always interesting. David and I used to watch Jim Lehrer’s News Hour quite a bit.

As for my honest opinion.

There are a lot of sources, individuals and companies out there who are giving opinions, not news. Opinion is fine if you know that’s what it is, not when it is presented as the facts.

• Social media is a very bad place to get your news from. Facebook is great for local news. I go there to find out about local events, traffic conditions etc. I don’t go there to find out national or international news.
• Twitter appears to be for people who want their five minutes of fame getting likes or being retweeted. It’s not about the news it’s about the person spreading it. (I am not on Twitter).