Filters

“And that’s the way it is”  Walter Cronkite

Traditional news outlets, radio, TV and newspapers have acted as our information filters to the world. Their value-added has been the collection, collating and prioritizing of supposed facts about what was happening around us  ... for which they were paid, often handsomely. Basically, we consumers of news relied on these filters to present us a consistent and reliable view of things so that we might take action. And, in exchange, we bought and perused their ink or listened to their advertisers. There was a certain comfort in knowing what slant a particular outlet would bring to their reporting ... and this slant or filter often became more important than the facts themselves.

No matter how much such media claim to be fair and balanced, they always slip back into a point of view. And the only way that consumers can get a rounded view of things is to partake of multiple news outlets ... a time taxing task ... one that too few choose.  So we live and have lived on a politically polarized nation. And even more so now that many additional internet news channels, Twitter, Google, Facebook, blogs, etc. have appeared. This seems a good development, not a bad one. Variety is the spice of life. The shortest route to national consensus would be a state-sponsored  media (like PBS or NPR) as the only news filter ... a bad thing.

Our founding fathers designed our government to be inefficient and contain opposing forces. And so constant conflict within our media is also a good thing. The danger posed is that one news filter (like Facebook) becomes so dominant as to overwhelm all others. This  should worry us all.