▶ Your Answer :
Often times, it is rather easy to depend on a single source to quickly catch up with the current news or to instantly fulfill a sudden curiosity. Yet, as a philosopher John Dewey believed in the absence of an ultimate truth, I believe that all information is imperfect and subject to change. Hence, the only way to stay well-informed is to collect information from as various news sources as possible and adjust whenever different or new information are present.
To begin with, no information is free from bias of the provider, and television news or newspapers are not an exception. Each channel or newspaper companies have different propensity of politics, which both directly and indirectly have influence on the contents they broadcast or publish. For instance, a female politician running for the presidential campaign volunteered to serve food in an orphanage. The next day, two different newspaper companies printed a similar article but with entirely different titles. One company wrote, “Mother of the orphans, mother of the nation” and the other company titled, “Help kids to hide scandals.” Facts are always prone to be biased, which makes those facts imperfect and subject to change over time. However, by being exposed to various news sources, we are able to understand information in diverse points of views.
In addition, there is a limitation in a single writer’s knowledge. Along with one’s inevitable bias, one’s personal interest or specialized field of study will form the focus of what s/he is writing. For example, I was searching for the current living standards of North Korean defectors in South Korea. Some news sources focused their articles on the statistical references while others focused on the defectors’ psychological experiences going through continuous culture shocks. Each news sources had different focus of the study depending on the writer’s capability, thus the more different news sources I was exposed to, the more details in different field I learned.
In consequence, we should try to gather as much news sources as possible because all information is imperfect due to the writers’ biases, personal interests, and specialized fields. Through looking over diverse news sources, we learn different point of views and fields within one issue, hence, stay well-informed.
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