Watch Christopher Hitchens Get Waterboarded

[Virulent]

If a corporate news entity uses objectivity and telling the truth to the public, I have no problem with them. Therefor I give the same metrics to those owned by a government entity.

Ok... but how do you determine if they are objective and tell the truth? Further, how are you certain what the truth is? If you know what is true, why do you even need the news in the first place?

I research and study and look at what is really happening and how it is covered. I make my determination from that, not from who owns who or how it is funded.

If you can look at what is really happening, why do you need any news at all (since, by definition, news is a filter)?

I'm suspicious that what you really do is you trust. You have faith in institutions like the BBC and NPR. Is it possible that could be accurate?

Where do you get your news and how do you determine who is telling the truth or not?

I wasn't sure if this was rhetorical or directed at me, but in case it was directed at me, I get my news from first-person accounts and video. When I want to know what is going on in Fallujah, or Ramallah, or wherever, I look for a blog of someone there. In my experience, amateurs who are merely chronicling their quotidian lives wear their biases on their sleeves, rather than trying to hide them like professional journalists.

I'm a huge fan and occasional participant in Jello Biafra's Camcorder Truth Jihad, an organization that flash-mobs events where State power might be used in an embarrassing way, and documents it with commentary-free video. One of my favorite incidents was during the '99 WTO conference in Seattle. Despite early reports by both NPR and the BBC reporting that the police were not using tear-gas, the CCTJ had 31 video-clips proving otherwise. Despite the New York Times claiming that a molotov cocktail was thrown at the police cordon, the CCTJ 24-hour multiple-camera coverage of the cordon demonstrated that this inexplicably false.

The objective truth is, most media outlets print exactly what their primary sources tell them to print... and more often than not, their primary sources are members of the entrenched establishment; police, government agents, statist propagandists. When you believe what they print, you're practicing second-hand gullibility.