Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Make the News True Neutral Once More

Bloggers are not journalists in the time honored tradition of reporters like Walter Cronkite. We are more in line with those individuals who do editorials. We give our partisan political views of what we think is going on in our party of choice.

The sad point is that most news media outlets are, because of rating wars and demand for commercial income, going more in the direction of designer editorials and less in the direction of true neutral reporting. It is really easy to pick a cable news network which fits you political view of the world today no matter which side you lean toward. The only problem with this is that if everything they report or say only reinforces what you already support then people are not forced to think about the other side of the coin.

The true benefit of freedom of speech is that it forces people to view ideas and concepts that they might not original agree with and it requires that people try to understand both sides of any issue. We are a completely divided country today because people don’t like to hear viewpoints that don’t dovetail with their own views on issues. Politicians are criticized or worse for talking with members of the other party at present. The art of compromise has become a fault in modern day society. If we want any hope of a future for our country than we need to begin to listen to and talk with the other side of that divide no matter how hard it will be from the start. We don’t have to agree with them at first but we should listen to their point of view.

We need to start by demanding that public news Medias move back to true neutral reporting of news events. We don’t want to hear just one side of the issues any longer and see just one party’s candidates. They should no longer attack any candidate unless that person has done something illegal or unethical. We want the facts and then let the public viewers decided how to interpret that information. If a news program is giving a point of view that is not neutral then they should not be allowed to call themselves a news program but only an editorial program. This rule should be absolute for evening news programs.