Why I Built NewsList
I have been a lifelong news and politics junkie. As far back as I can remember, an issue of Newsweek would come to our house each week, and as a child learning about the world, I was intrigued by the stories about famines and revolutions in Africa, the conflict in the middle east and the Cold War. At some point, I got the idea in my head that being informed about world events was a virtue.
I had a high school history teacher who did a great job of showing how the past informs the present in his current events class, and he was one of the inspirations for me to seek a degree in political science. Though I didn’t do much with the Political Science degree, I did remain a rabid consumer of the news, and I’ve been watching the industry evolve over the last three and one half decades.
If there was one phenomenon that inspired me to create NewsList, it would be what seems to be a consensus among media outlets as a whole to allow two publications, the New York Times and Washington Post, to determine not only what is the news but how it should be interpreted. There has been a decades old tradition, especially with broadcast news programs, of only referencing those two publications and using their news stories as launching points for political discussions and using their opinion pieces to determine the content of those discussions. The phenomenon seemed to become more pronounced in the early 2000’s which may have been caused by the explosion of the internet and cable news programs. With so many new media companies ‘doing news’, editors were looking for a source of truth and authenticity in a world of opinion and propaganda, and so they began to rely on these two ‘blue chip’, legacy media outlets that have spent decades building up their reputations. The main issue that I have with this is that the New York Times and Washington Post themselves have too often been found to be engaging in opinion and propaganda as opposed to doing real news journalism.
Most people would agree with me if I said that all news is biased. And so most people can understand that if you are just getting your news from one or two biased news outlets, you are going to be less informed than if you were to get your news from a multitude of biased outlets. One particular bias that news organizations demonstrate is in what stories they actually choose to report. So if each news outlet is choosing to not report on particular stories, then getting your news from multiple sources will offset this particular bias, and you will be more informed. This idea was a major inspiration for the creation of NewsList.
I believe that being a good citizen requires you to be an informed voter, and a free press is critical for a strong republic. We, as a society, used to enjoy reading the news back in 50’s, 60’s and 70’s despite the three national networks producing live nightly broadcasts. Folks would pay to have a newspaper thrown onto their doorstep each morning. I think people have quit reading the news because of all the distractions, which started with the explosion of the cable news shows in the 1990’s. I believe people can enjoy reading the news again if it is delivered in the right format. Print media is a very efficient way of transmitting information. On the NewsList web app, if you just scan the headlines and look at a few descriptions of the stories at the top of Al Jazeera, CNN and NBC, you can come away with more knowledge about the current state of our world than watching an entire nightly news broadcast.
I appreciate all of the users of NewsList and encourage you to share the website with anyone who might be interested. It is a great tool for news junkies, but non-addicts are also welcome. Slay them with facts, I say, and thanks for reading.