News

For quite some time now, possibly as long as a year, I have spent most of my lunch breaks reading blogs (and possibly writing in my LJ, heh). I'm growing more and more dissatisfied, though, with blogs as I find it difficult to maintain a balance of opinion. The problem with blogs is that you aren't reading news articles so much as you are reading editorials and commentaries with some news articles mixed into it....as they say, to tell effective lies, make a part or most of it the truth.

Before the election I found myself reading assorted left-leaning blogs, and I couldn't believe that anyone would ever think conservatively and be sane. More recently I ahve found myself reading libertarian oriented blogs, combined with self-study of economics, and question what on earth anyone in government is thinking at all.

Through recent years, since late high school, I've classified myself as a centrist, with mostly libertarian leanings, but even finding sources with the same political orientation (when possible) is disappointing. I guess I'm just sick of reading people's opinions (no, the irony of this writing is not lost on me). I'm sick of it being passed of as significant, superior, or somehow the truth. I'm annoyed with editors and writers that try to make ordinary people into noble heros or diabolical fools. I'm just tired of it.

So I'm passing off on reading the 'blogosphere.' It's incestuous and masturbatory. And I think I mentioned annoying already. Looking for a balance, or better yet, lack of opinions, I turn to a few sources:

The BBC News is probably the least opinionated of sources. Some argue it has a liberal bias; but if so it is most certainly because the BBC is the national news service in the UK, and given that the UK is so ethnically, politically, and religiously diverse these days, I'm willing to bet the BBC is just trying to cater to everyone in that mix.

The International Herald Tribune is another source more or less lacking in opinion. The editorial board seems pretty smart and centered, again possibly leaning a little left. That's understandable given the publication is a balance of US and European news, similar to the beeb. It gets a lot of news second-hand from other sources, but it seems more polished a lot of the time. No "THIS IS BREAKING NEWS SO WE DON'T KNOW ANYTHING UPDATES SOON!" type of headlines.

Finally, the Christian Science Monitor may come as a surprise, but it has some excellent political cartoons, commentary, and feature articles that are really aimed at understanding the government, trying to be fair to all political thought, and never comes off sounding stupid...that I've seen anyway. Its affiliation with ChrSci isn't an impediment at all, they generally just have a column about it at the very bottom, and are more inclined to point out that people need to fix things themselves sometimes. In that way its a good balance to the other two. Also, I love the political cartoons they have. :)

I just wanted to share that blogs suck, and for all its faults, mainstream media does it better for me. Especially non-superstar type sources that care more about the news than an ideology. :)