It feels like we are all having our chain pulled here. I do hope that the average person on the street knows that there is a lot of crap on the Internet. As a writer, I spend more time researching than pounding the keys of my computer. And I can still make mistakes. It is when I don’t take the time to double and triple check my facts that I can get in trouble.
Any good researcher is aware of the biases of the various search tools on the Internet. You can skip the first purchased entries on Google. You can reject the supposed news feed on Facebook. I am not sure those organizations can tell the difference between news and scams. You believe their news at your peril. They feed ignorance with false news. They mix advertising that looks like their news to fool you.
And yet, we hear from pollsters that 29 per cent of Canadians get their news from Facebook. If you have ever hoped the pollsters might be wrong, that is the time for it.
It was many years ago that I worked for the Globe and Mail in Toronto and yet I still believe I get a better balance of news from the Toronto Star. When digging deeper into world news, I try to check the opinions of the North American edition of the Economist with the New York Times.
You have to feel sorry for the people who do not tune in to the broadcast news on radio or television, or read a newspaper. There is a world out there and we need to be attuned to what is happening. And by the way, Blogs are not news. Blogs are opinions.
I still do not understand why news articles found by Google and other search engines, should be paid for. If the newspaper or magazine does not have a pay wall, that is the media’s problem, not the search engines.
And you can hardly blame the legitimate news media for wanting to be paid for their output. Costs keep rising and you can be very frustrated with people who think it should be free.
I am not charging anyone for this output because, it is what it is; my opinion.
-30-
Copyright 2023 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to: