If you are like me, you despair of finding a reliable source for “news.”  In the old days, there was one source for everyone, the newspaper.  The newspaper published daily, was delivered by a neighborhood kid, and you’d find your copy lying at the end of the driveway.  Television news was a informative summary, but lacked the range of stories, and the depth of analysis that the printed page afforded.

I often watch channel 7, ABC news at 10PM in the evening solely because I find the personalities of the cast appealing, a pleasant way to end my day before turning in for the night.  I do not expect to be informed in depth about anything.  It’s meant to be entertainment and it is.  Believe it or not, the weather forecast with the spiffy graphics are the featured aspect of the broadcast.  The rest is utterly predicable.  The network promotes the broadcast as “live” news, which means that they will have a reporter standing outside a police station to report a murder, or some other run of the mill tragedy.  When it’s snowing, a reporter will be in the backseat of a vehicle driving on a snowy tollway. He/she earnestly speaks into the microphone to tell me that the roads are wet and it is snowing.  As I said, the pleasant personalities and the intelligent wit of the staff is the redeeming quality, inducing me to persevere as a viewer.

I will let you in on a secret.  When I desire to view a news broadcast, that informs with integrity, describing important events with careful reporting, I tune in to the NHK World channel.  A broadcast originating in Tokyo is more informative than anything available to me Stateside.  That is my choice.  You might prefer Fox “news” or CNN or BBC America.

The internet feed that is changed minute to minute on my cell phone screen has little to no news value.  The sources are multiple and precious few facts are selected.  Responsible stories are indistinguishable from propaganda.  It all appears the same.  And the heavy lifting of the reporting is in the visuals.

Social media, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is a food-fight of opinion, a liars fest if you will.  Naturally when one feels so passionate, it is hard to tell if one is lying.  Is one lying?  The point is that it’s a hall of mirrors, no different than the County Fair fun house that you visited when you were a kid.

Here are some insights that I gained from Farhad Manjoo who writes for the NY Times.

1. Life as lived is slow
2. It takes time to figure out what has happened.
3. It takes time to properly fit events into context.

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1. Technology is blazing fast
2. Smart phones and social networks feed us facts about the news faster than we can make sense of them.
3. Speculation and propaganda fill the gap.