People who have known me for a long time will agree that I have certainly got my money out of newspapers. I have been an on again off again current events, and foreign news junkie since the 70’s, and I have also dealt with an (ahem…) addiction to crossword puzzles and Sudoku over the years too. As a consequence, it seems rather sad for me to say that I have little use for the traditional major newspapers in the USA.
Yesterday, I wrote about the need for students to develop more critical reading skills than ever before. Newspapers are a prime example of this. I find that I can’t get a clear idea of what is actually taking place in this country without comparing and contrasting news reports from as many diametrically opposed points of view as I can. It’s not that I don’t have any trust in their abilities to write or even to report…I just see an increasing amount of subjective bias in news reporting (increasingly so!).
At least for international news there are some tools that you can use to gather what is really going on. The website refdesk.com is a great place to find links too many non-US news sources (newspapers from almost every country, as well as some other news organs…). I find this especially important as US TV news covers as little international news as they can (with newspapers following close behind…).
Google translate is a great tool to use with many foreign newspapers, especially or some younger students, since it will intrinsically add in a large portion of ambiguity into any translated reporting they could see. Reading things that you have to take with a grain of salt is the new paradigm (I guess!).
How comfortable you can be with ambiguity is often seen as a direct correlative to cognitive development. Most people like concise, clean, easy answers…I know I do. But there is more to ambiguity than the overused meme of a topic being too nuanced for the hoi polloi to understand. That is a red herring, if only for the point I am trying to make. It’s not about the arguments being too hard to understand, it’s about the answers being partial, at best.
I have used some of the newspapers I find at refdesk.com to look into what the news organs in IRAN are saying (versus CNN, ABC, FOX, pr the New York Times). This might be a great example of ambiguity since these official organs of news from IRAN are filled with a completely different kind of spin that we normally see in US media. IT reminds me of reading some 1970’s soviet journals and newspapers…that is, it hones your ability to ask questions in which the answers reside between the lines.
These methods seem to be directly related to any reasonable, serious study of current events. Having the skills to read in this manner (i.e. actually comparing and contrasting information with previous information, are what much of what real college work is about).
If I ruled the world, or at least had some control over education policy (in my world, these two points are about the same thing…sigh), I would make this sort of advanced reading methodology a prerequisite to being accepted into any college.
as a final note..there are newspapers that are still worth reading, it’s just that the vast majority of them are not in the USA…
