What News Media Don’t Show

People tend to forget that most of the news media don’t need to deliver valuable information to help people make better decisions. Usually the news media made to earn money, so they will deliver entertaining news, not useful or valuable. I recommend to think of any news media as a business enterprise, they will basically publish anything which earn them more money and which isn’t against the law.

Does that mean that we can’t get any useful information from big media corporations? We can, but only from time to time. Mostly we get something which can’t improve our decisions, but which can even make decisions worse because news can distract us from useful and valuable information.

And does that mean we don’t need any news? I recommend to consume only selected few of news media, and even in that case think carefully about news articles you are going to base your decisions on. Sometimes news media have a number of policies they follow, having policies like this can help to keep the same quality of the news. Also some news media may have lesser influence from their financial backers. For example Wikinews donors hopefully doesn’t censor news articles there and don’t force a political agenda. Instead the site promotes a neutral point of view, urging writers to represent all views fairly and report facts without bias. While particular writers still may be biased—that’s why you should always critically analyze any piece of news—the site as a whole can be more reliable source of information in some areas than news media owned by big corporations and expected to generate a steady profit.

I briefly repeat the main points of analyzing news: check the reputation of the author and the medium. Check their sources. Check the internal logic of the text. Look for biases and logical fallacies. Ask yourself who can benefit from people reading the text? What can be the goal to write the text?