Posted 7:14 AM by Bonnie

From this weeks Tuesday Newsday meme:

Tuesday, June 01, 2004
where is the news?
With the holiday just finished, I totally forgot this was Tuesday for a bit! I also didn't watch or listen to news much over the the four days off. And as I was catching up this morning, and wondering at some of the CNN's "top headlines" telling us Julia Roberts is pregnant and that the runner up on The Apprentice show as fired once more from being a judge at the Miss Universe pageant, I started wondering where to find "real news." So my questions this week are:

1. From where do you get your news and why?

I presume you are talking about national news...local news of course is from the local news channel, but for national news and stories of interest...

This may be strange but we listen to talk radio at night and the hosts do a lot of stories from the news. People call in with their views on stories. One in particular is Art Bell Coast to Coast. He also has some weird stuff, but it's interesting to hear different view points.

I watch CNN at times, but feel it is so homongenized I'm not getting the real stories.

2. Do major news services really present just the news, and should they?

In my humble opinion no, they do not present just the news. A lot of what they present is stuff we don't need to know or care about. It's a lot of filler to try to fill our minds with garbage to keep us from remembering there is "real news" happening out there. Also, I feel a lot of what we are fed has been edited to fit a time frame and to keep from being controversial. I don't know if it's the networks idea to do that or if they are censored.

3. Do you consider talk radio, (Air America on the Left, Rush Limbaugh on the right) to be news?

Well, I just stated above we listen to talk radio for at least a different skew on the news. We don't like Rush Limbaugh or Michael Reagan because they and their viewers will not see the forest for the trees. They are partyline folks and if you disagree with something they (Rush or Reagan) will talk over you and even hang up on you and then sneer at you and laugh about what you said without ever having given the caller a chance to really voice their views or defend their views. It's as if they are afraid the "disagreeing" caller is making too much sense and people might start to actually see the truth about the current administration.

So, yes and no. Like we choose newspapers because of their content, tv shows because of their content and viability, we have listened to and chosen Art Bell (and his various hosts) as at least having a more open mind and letting people talk even if they don't agree, so the public gets both sides of the story. Yes, he often does strange stories in the last hour about aliens and such (by the way he was co-author or the book that was just made into a hit movie...The Day After Tomorrow or something like that), but he also does political shows and those are the ones I listen to because he does present both sides intelligently, logically, and he doesn't have to whine and cut people off like Reagan and Limbaugh.