Quote Originally Posted by orion View Post
"The more voices there are the more spin there is. The truth becomes that much harder to find. In the end its just all noise."

Interesting. In Germany we have a saying: "The truth lies inbetween." But in contrary to our saying in with "lie" the sense of "alocate" the English version has a certain ambiguity, doesn't it? Awesome ...

Besides: Is all this a question about spreading the truth or about forming opinion or about both? Or from the perspective of the audience: expecting or accepting 'a' instead of 'the' truth or just opinions?
From another angle: What is the task of nems-services or media; and are they even capable of sueccessfully passing the challenge?

Journalists and their editors spread their information they have collected in the first place. And most information they extract from a huge variety of sources: statistics, interviews, informants, press-releases, hearsay, conclusions, bribery(?) etc, while it might be imortant to highlight that first-hand-information may play a rather small role all of this. Therefore the information provided by news-services/ media is by no means 'neutral' in the first place, although almost any information has a neutral core. Small example:
Two news-services report about a car-accident on a junction caused by a bloody young driver with no experience at all and a very old driver. Both news share the same core: there was a car-accident; but because both journalists have chosen to talk to different whitnesses and looked at different pictures about the scene, both news have different tendencies: the first one gives you the impression that the young driver might have underestimated the situation which might have caused the accident, while the second news tells you about danger of traffic by old people over-estimating their skills considering their loss of reaction-time, sight, etc.
Which news is a news?
This example you can extrapolate on many other news being reported.

All this being said: maybe news-services/ media are just intermediaries or multipliers for any kind of information. The tendentious work might be a problem for some people, because it does not correlate with their expectations or even acceptance, while again it suits the expectation of the other part of the audience.

My conclusion from this long and interesting discussion therefore is: For as long as news-services or media simply do not outright lie about things, anything may be possible, some things could be made better; but I don't see any case of misinformation or wrongful doings by the news-services or media - even if I don't like the tendentious work of at least some of those services.

I would be very glad, if someone challenges these thoughts, if there are major flaws in it I should have taken care off ...

All the best!
Liam