<p>… or just sloppy in verifying information before rushing to put out the story?</p>
<p>Television news is pretty awful, since they tend to run the most sensational story all the time, often to the exclusion of everything else. But since the story does not change that quickly, they grab any crumb of information, rumor, inference, etc. to incorporate into the “latest news about ____”, even though such crumbs may not be all that accurate.</p>
<p>FYI - Shepard Smith is liberal</p>
<p>One thing I don’t care for is the cable news stations assuming that during a crisis, we want to see the SAME announcer all day long.</p>
<p>I also like BBG and NPR. Right now am getting info from the web. It’s not a site I ever hears of before--zerohedge.com live.</p>
<p>NPR. I think they are very careful in their reporting, and if they make a mistake they backtrack and say so. Online I frequent Google News and check various sources for the same headline/story.</p>
<p>al jazeera english and democracy now! with amy goodman and juan gonzales.</p>
<p>cnn/npr/fox/etc…no difference whatsoever. pure garbage.</p>
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<p>I agree. Honestly, I do not understand how anyone who has actually listened to them could compare Fox to NPR.</p>
<p>NPR, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and CNN. Once in a while Al Jazeera English.</p>
<p>NPR is the official government radio station. I don’t believe the second Iraq invasion would ever have happened without them (why were semi-amateur reporters able to find the lies in Powell’s UN testimony in less than 48 hours, but NPR couldn’t), and the second Iraq War (which began with the Christmas bombing of Iraq in 1998) wouldn’t have happened without them, and the Clinton genocide - a million dead, half of them children under the age of five - couldn’t have happened either.</p>
<p>They sound reasonable (which is why people like them), but they are in reality nothing but government shils, reading and reporting on government press releases and government spokespeople without any real critical sense whatsoever. And it doesn’t matter who is in power.</p>
<p>If someone knows and understands enough about the subject that the news is about, s/he is probably biased in some way about it.</p>
<p>If someone is unbiased about the subject that the news is about, s/he is probably not knowledgeable or interested enough to report it with good accuracy.</p>
<p>Of course, someone can be both biased and unknowledgeable about a given subject.</p>
<p>I spent last night listening to the Boston area police scanners on the internet.</p>
<p>OP, CNN was hardly the only outlet which got it wrong earlier this week:</p>
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<p>[Boston</a> bombing: Media haste makes mistakes - CSMonitor.com](<a href=“http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2013/0419/Boston-bombing-Media-haste-makes-mistakes]Boston”>Boston bombing: Media haste makes mistakes - CSMonitor.com)</p>
<p>I think we news consumers should acknowledge that some of this is our fault. How many of us were glued to our TVs for the last 24 hours, hanging on every new detail, right or wrong? We may SAY we don’t want them to report until they’re absolutely sure they’re right. But how many of us would watch, say, Fox if they took the approach that “We will not report anything until it is publicly confirmed by an official authority”? They’d be hours behind every other outlet, and they’d quickly lose their viewers.</p>
<p>In a fast-breaking situation like last night, I flip around between CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. I also stay tuned to Google News; that’s where I found that the Boston Globe was the first to report that the suspect in custody was in fact one of the Marathon bombers. But I also understand that in a chaotic situation like last night, much of the early reporting is going to turn out to be wrong. I don’t expect otherwise.</p>
<p>I think CC is the most trusted news source. :)</p>
<p>^^Well, that’s a given. :)</p>
<p>I reviewed the BBC footage and reports to catch up on the Boston issue. CBC had ads on everything which was ridiculously annoying, and CNN and FOX were primarily just focusing on interviews.</p>
<p>Follow a bunch of people who are into same politics/news that you are. If I spend an hour reading the most interesting articles posted, I can watch the news for the next five hours and not see a story I didn’t already cover on twitter. The people you follow will also introduce you to many new news sites.</p>
<p>The government shill-NPR is also where I get my BBC news. With my friends last night we all watched different news shows as the capture was unfolding. Fox noting on the ticker that they had captured the terrorist Zoey Deschanel was an epic fail, and not the only thing I that made me question their news department. </p>
<p>I tend to avoid all of them for any story that is ongoing and use the internet. I don’t want to hear speculation from former communication majors that may or may not have even taken a history, economics or poli sci class in college. Better to read the facts and avoid the endless speculation.</p>
<p>NPR hands down, with a smattering of BBC.</p>
<p>NPR as a “government-shill” ? Does anyone believe this? What government? NPR has been around since 1970, the Johnson administration. Is someone suggesting that the radio station was a puppet for each administration since then? I have been listening for the past 20 years–this is simply not true. No other television or radio station, IMHO, offers their level of intelligent, in-depth coverage of national & international stories. (One can listen to NPR and be blissfully unaware of what a Kardashian is, or what Lindsy Lohan is up to.)</p>
<p>" Is someone suggesting that the radio station was a puppet for each administration since then?"</p>
<p>I’m not only suggesting it; I’m saying it flat out. In depth? When Margaret Albright went on national tv with Leslie Stahl in 1996 and admitted that the U.S. was responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, did you hear even ONE report from an Iraqi hospital? Or a family with dead children? When the genocide had failed, and the Democrats created the WMD lie, did you hear any questions? When Powell lied at the U.N., why was it that a semi-amateur reporter uncovered the lie in less than 48 hours, but NPR never questioned it? When chemical weapons were used in 1988 against Iran, did NPR run a single story about where the weapons came from? When is the last time you heard a story about a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan?</p>
<p>I could make a much longer list, but they all have one thing in common: whenever there is an “oversight”, a “missed” story, or a massed group of interviews, it is always in the service of the government’s line (and it doesn’t matter which party is in power.)</p>
<p>Don’t get me started on “education” stories.</p>
<p>Mostly they just read government press releases and comment on them.</p>
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<p>Written articles (whether on paper or the internet) tend to be a lot better than television news sound bites in terms of the amount of information conveyed (although one still has to be aware of the possibility of inaccurate information from poorly informed reporters and writers, or political biases coming in).</p>
<p>Those of you who get your news from BBC, is it from their website? I have to admit that in a situation such as yesterday’s manhunt, I like the convenience of turning on the TV. But after Thursday’s fiasco, I was boycotting CNN. Then when the major networks went back to their regular programming, I was stuck.</p>