Everything that I’ve said here applies to any source of information. Most “professional” news sources simply repeat what they’ve heard: if it comes over the newswire, and it looks sensational, it stands a chance of getting in. No fact checking is performed for a significant number of those items.
You will want to apply the same critical analysis to what you read in newspapers and see on the news, as you would from anything coming over the Internet. A little more, actually, as false information coming over a Usenet newsgroup will be challenged almost immediately. It takes days for challenges to reach newspapers, and even then the newspapers get to choose which challenges see print. Television won’t show any challenges.
- Traditional Sources: Newspapers
- Newspapers are one of the worst places to go for source information. Few newspapers research any more than their biggest features. The rest are reproduced nearly verbatim from press releases, press wires, and, believe it or not, e-mail chain letters.
- Traditional Sources: Television
- Television has different problems from newspapers. Newspapers at least have the option of going into detail on one in a hundred stories if they desire to. Television cannot. Even a 24-hour-a-day news station still only has 24-hours, even if they never cover the same story twice. Since they prefer to cover most of the major stories every hour, the true time is vastly less than that. Most television stories are the equivalent of newspaper headlines…
