Slashdot Mirror
Does Personalized News Lead To Ignorance?
blackbearnh writes "As newspapers struggle to survive and local broadcasts try to find a way to compete with cable news, more and more news outlets are banking on what people want to hear about, rather than what they need to hear. Thoughtful analysis of problems is being pushed out of the way to make room for more celebrity gossip. Electronic news guru Chris Lee thinks that as people get news increasingly tailored to their tastes, the overall knowledge of important issues is plummeting. 'I think one of the observations about how consumers are behaving in the past five years that has surprised me the most is, again, this lack of feeling responsible for knowing the news of their country and their local government of that day. I don't think it's just a technology question. I think if you asked people now versus the same age group 20 years ago, I think they'd be stunningly less informed now about boring news, and tremendously more knowledgeable about bits of news that really interest them.'"
I can see a problem with your approach... namely that Ha'aretz and al-Jazeera provide narrow regional news rather than broad coverage.
I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.
I know the countries you speak of, and if you look at policies passed / proposed in the past year, you'll find that Obama has emulated them wonderfully. Just because Obama knows he can't change the entire government overnight doesn't mean he doesn't WANT to.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Elitism and intolerance causes the latter, not the former.
FTFY
I call it a bullshit Fox News talking point. Even if it were true, what evidence is there that these government 'death panels' would be any worse than the insurance company death panels that already exist?