A newspaper consumers guide
Consumers of newspapers are getting harder to handle for the biased newsroom. Readers are more informed, more powerfull, higher educated and more globalized than ever:
â– They study alternative perspectives and world views, learning how
to interpret events from multiple viewpoints.
â– They seek understanding and insight through multiple sources of
thought and information, not simply those of the mass media.
â– They learn how to identify the viewpoints embedded in
news stories.
â– They mentally rewrite (reconstruct) news stories through awareness
of how stories would be told from multiple perspectives.
â– They analyze news constructs in the same way they analyze
other representations of reality (as some blend of fact and
interpretation).
â– They assess news stories for their clarity, accuracy, relevance,
depth, breadth, and significance.
â– They notice contradictions and inconsistencies in the news
(often in the same story).
â– They notice the agenda and interests served by a story.
â– They notice the facts covered and the facts ignored.
â– They notice what is represented as fact (that is in dispute).
â– They notice questionable assumptions implicit in stories.
â– They notice what is implied (but not openly stated).
â– They notice what implications are ignored and what are
emphasized.
â– They notice which points of view are systematically put into a
favorable light and which in an unfavorable light.
â– They mentally correct stories reflecting bias toward the unusual,
the dramatic, and the sensational by putting them into perspective
or discounting them.
â– They question the social conventions and taboos being used to
define issues and problems.
From http://www.criticalthinking.org
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I must admit i rarely succumb to the delights of reading a newspaper. When i do i most certainly do automatically adjust the story to reflect my take on the story. Obviously in an attempt to remove the reporters own biases (and replacing with mine possibly).
I stumbled across your blog today and found it quite enjoyable.
Top blogging fella.
Comment by RichieB — May 3, 2005 @ 3:50 pm