Mainstream news is a mess. John Stewart first brought it to my attention in his 2004 crossfire interview. The Newsflesh Trilogy reiterated the fact. And most recently, a top-notch HBO show called The Newsroom is trying to shine a light on how the news media could be better. I'll state up front that much of this rant has its impetus in my viewing of that show.
When news programs fail to call out the blatant mistruths peddled by politicians, the resultant "he-said-she-said journalism" harms political discourse. We need news programs that will tell us when people are lying rather than just telling us what they say. Having to visit FactCheck or PolitiFact shouldn't be a necessity. A responsible news program would already have the facts and would present them. As it stands today, the misguided objectivity held by news organizations puts equal weight on every point of view, even stupid ones. There aren't two sides to every story. Some have ten sides. Some have only one side.
One of the things I learned in probably fifth or sixth grade that I'm surprised to still remember today is the term agenda-setting. This is the ability of the news media not to tell us what to think, but rather to tell us what to think about. I believe strongly that the media are misusing their agenda-setting ability. They have the power to shine a light on important issues and bring them to the forefront, and instead they report on celebrity break-ups and a mosque being built in lower Manhattan.
Here's the thing. The internet and social media being what it is, we now have the ability to share news with each other. This first popped into my head earlier when I read an article entitled Will your Internet provider be spying on you?. I received it in a group email from a friend who works in IT security. I then shared the article in a Google plus post with a number of other friends. From there, we can discuss the article more privately than we could in the comments of a blog such as this one. And at least once, when a story like this has come up, I've had a friend pipe in and debunk it, which is excellent. I love the dissenting opinions, and I love having factual inaccuracies pointed out.
Sharing news through social networks is of course a far cry from legitimate and responsible news run by educated journalists and well-researched by a team with the time to do so, but it's somewhere to go other than corporate-influenced "mainstream" media. The one problem I see is that the stories you see on Google Plus or Facebook will depend largely on your social circle, and this likely creates bias. It's certainly not perfect. But crowdsourced news does avoid a few of the pitfalls of centralized news, and at least it creates interesting conversation.
(as a side note, you may notice that I now share the public items in my own Google Plus feed in the "They Said" section in the third column of my home page)