In perusing news outlets this morning, it became clear that newsworthiness is entirely subjective.
Not that this is news to most of us.
Take, for instance, the Indiana earthquake this morning.
Yes, there was a 3.8 magnitude earthquake in Indiana this morning, with its epicenter “about 5 miles southeast of the town of Greentown.” No, we couldn’t feel it all the way over here in the Rocky Mountains, and no, there was apparently not a lot of damage, if any. However, this is a fairly significant seismic event, but I had to troll a few major news websites before I found even one (1) mention of the Indiana earthquake. I found this mention on CNN.com. Hooray for you, CNN, you win this morning.
I bring this up because there have recently been loads of polls by several pollsters, some of them obviously liberal and others obviously conservative, in which shots have been taken at news outlets. Most of these polls have decided that a given outlet is to blame for most of the lack of good information being disseminated.
But no, my friends, as we can see in the case of the Indiana earthquake, all news outlets generally bite.
So if we want to get real news from as many possible angles, we can’t be lazy. We ought to have a series of sites we go to for information and we should deliberately include the ones that are biased one way or the other.
If we don’t do this, we might sleep through more than an earthquake in Indiana; we might sleep through our responsibility to make a difference.
Thank you, Indiana earthquake, for giving me this opportunity to get on a soap box.