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This is the best part of Ben's article: > I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previou

This is the best part of Ben's article: > I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet…the New York Times doesn’t have the truth, but then again, neither do I, and neither does Amazon. This is the key insight in news today. You cannot rely on any one source for the full story. You must read multiple perspectives, ideally from different points in the political spectrum. My father, and likely others who grew up pre-internet, knew this intuitively and always read multiple papers. We should do the same and stop expecting our favourite source to be the final word on a story.

citizenkeen 6y ago
I remember my father used to listen to Dr. Laura every day on his commute. My father is every bit a Massachusetts progressive. He used to arrange his schedule to make sure he could hear things like Dr. Farrakhan's speech at the Million Man March. He'd read the Wall Street Journal and get frustrated. I once asked why, and he said "It's important to know what other people think, even if they're wrong. Because every once in a while, you're the one who's wrong."
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  And at least you can be right about what other people think, you can be right about how other people are wrong
- poulsbohemian 6y ago
  > He'd read the Wall Street Journal and get frustrated. I'm frustrated with the WSJ too. What used to be a conservative but respected publication has over the years turned to little more than pop news and sensationalism.
toyg 6y ago
I was taught this by my dad and my schoolteachers too. Up until the ‘90s, in Italy you knew in advance whose editorial perspective you were getting from any given newspaper or tv bulletin; so it was deemed necessary to survey a plurality of them to figure out the most likely scenario for any given piece of news. In the end, though, only the most politically engaged would actually do that, and typically in order to know “what the enemy thinks” for tactical reasons. Nowadays it’s all a bit murky - traditional big-money owners are not interested in paying for a dying media, and political parties are chronically broke and often short-lived, so even the biggest properties can quickly change hands from chancer to chancer.
ivanhoe 6y ago
At some point it becomes a burden to do it yourself, so you'll be forced to outsource it to a person or company of trust, to follow all the news for you and filter out the important ones, ask around with their contacts, do the fact checking, and give you a digestible overview of what's going on - and then you're basically back at the square one, as you've just re-invented the journalism.
coldtea 6y ago
>This is the key insight in news today. You cannot rely on any one source for the full story. You must read multiple perspectives, ideally from different points in the political spectrum. The problem is that counter-intuitively, in the past with limited news sources, you're more or less forced to hear more sides of the story. A newspaper would carry both e.g. conservatives and liberals (at least a few of the side it didn't favor) to attract people. If you bought it, you had the chance to see the other side expressed. Now with the internet, we can loose ourselves in an echo bubble of our own creation (only reading stuff on "our" side, since we're no longer forced to get our news wholesale like in print newspaper format). Or the news website or social media site can elect to show us just (or much more of) the stuff we like by itself.

citizenkeen 6y ago

I remember my father used to listen to Dr. Laura every day on his commute. My father is every bit a Massachusetts progressive. He used to arrange his schedule to make sure he could hear things like Dr. Farrakhan's speech at the Million Man March. He'd read the Wall Street Journal and get frustrated. I once asked why, and he said "It's important to know what other people think, even if they're wrong. Because every once in a while, you're the one who's wrong."

galaxyLogic 6y ago
And at least you can be right about what other people think, you can be right about how other people are wrong
poulsbohemian 6y ago
> He'd read the Wall Street Journal and get frustrated. I'm frustrated with the WSJ too. What used to be a conservative but respected publication has over the years turned to little more than pop news and sensationalism.

toyg 6y ago

I was taught this by my dad and my schoolteachers too. Up until the ‘90s, in Italy you knew in advance whose editorial perspective you were getting from any given newspaper or tv bulletin; so it was deemed necessary to survey a plurality of them to figure out the most likely scenario for any given piece of news. In the end, though, only the most politically engaged would actually do that, and typically in order to know “what the enemy thinks” for tactical reasons. Nowadays it’s all a bit murky - traditional big-money owners are not interested in paying for a dying media, and political parties are chronically broke and often short-lived, so even the biggest properties can quickly change hands from chancer to chancer.

ivanhoe 6y ago

At some point it becomes a burden to do it yourself, so you'll be forced to outsource it to a person or company of trust, to follow all the news for you and filter out the important ones, ask around with their contacts, do the fact checking, and give you a digestible overview of what's going on - and then you're basically back at the square one, as you've just re-invented the journalism.

coldtea 6y ago

>This is the key insight in news today. You cannot rely on any one source for the full story. You must read multiple perspectives, ideally from different points in the political spectrum. The problem is that counter-intuitively, in the past with limited news sources, you're more or less forced to hear more sides of the story. A newspaper would carry both e.g. conservatives and liberals (at least a few of the side it didn't favor) to attract people. If you bought it, you had the chance to see the other side expressed. Now with the internet, we can loose ourselves in an echo bubble of our own creation (only reading stuff on "our" side, since we're no longer forced to get our news wholesale like in print newspaper format). Or the news website or social media site can elect to show us just (or much more of) the stuff we like by itself.