Growing up, my family’s home phone number was written in permanent ink at the top of the emergency contact list in my brain. I always felt secure knowing I could use it to instantly connect with my home and family, and never imagined a day when that feeling would change.
Sometime in the past few years, my parents canceled this number. The most fascinating thing about this change was how insignificant it turned out to be. I barely noticed the loss because it didn’t affect my life at all. We’d already been using our cell phones so much that our home phone had become little more than an opportunity for telemarketers.
Likewise, I barely noticed when my family cancelled its subscription to our local paper. Like so many other families, we participated in this nationwide trend that’s driven many newspapers out of business and others, like the Chicago Tribune, into bankruptcy. Besides, I was long out of the house and used to getting the news from whatever news Web site or blog I felt like visiting.
I like our ability to choose between many news sources. My knowledge of the news used to be limited to what was in that day’s Columbus Dispatch, but now I have a half-dozen news sources from around the world just in my ‘favorites’ bar. Some of them concentrate on politics or the economy, giving me in-depth coverage on what interests me most that I didn’t have before.
But I worry that the new way of getting the news encourages us to visit sources that confirm our political biases instead of exposing us to the different points of view we might have found in less biased sources. The Drudge Report, a “news aggregator” that links to stories on other news Web sites, has 1.75 million daily visitors. The Report also has a conservative bias, and isn’t shy about it.
Headlines about the stimulus package are often shown with a picture of a hand holding a fan of hundred dollar bills. There’s usually a big red headline at the top of the page, describing an interesting but insignificant liberal political mishap. The site recently made a big deal out of Obama’s disappointing gift of a DVD set to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for example.
The Drudge Report’s readership is heavily conservative, with 60 percent identifying as Republicans and only eight percent as Democrats. Why? Because we like reading stories that confirm what we already think. If you don’t like President Obama and you think the French don’t like to work, the Drudge Report might brighten your day, but it won’t educate you like the more balanced reporting of a newspaper would have.
Liberal Web sites are just as guilty. Remember when the Huffington Post ran big red headlines about Sarah Palin’s fashion spending? The site still devotes an entire page to the ex-candidate. I just learned Eminem describes sex with her in his most recent single.
I enjoy both sites. I chuckle at Drudge’s sarcasm even if I don’t agree with his interpretation. But neither should serve as anyone’s primary source of news. Traditional papers provide us with balanced, in-depth, professional reporting these sites just don’t offer. We should reserve a place for them, or at least their online versions.
Weinberg senior Richard Webner can be reached at [email protected].
