Tread lightly on the things of earth

From How the Bush Administration gets away with it:

When you have a situation where the people who are watching the news on television are as ill informed than the people who aren’t watching, our democracy is in serious trouble.

The author continues —

Alternative news sites like Common Dreams, Cursor, Working For Change, AlterNet, TruthOut, The Progressive Review, and The Smirking Chimp are all good places to find the news you’re not getting from the corporate press.

I finally realized a couple of years ago that if your only news comes from mainstream U.S. media sources, your awareness of world events is not balanced, to put it mildly. Tracking news from numerous international sources is absolutely necessary — there’s little excuse for a less-than-global perspective on events. And there’s no excuse for deliberate ignorance.

Case in point: CNN edits Blix transcript, wherein “parts of Hans Blix’s presentation to the UN that described Iraqi cooperation with inspectors were edited out of a CNN transcript of the report.”

2003-02-18 update: Paul Krugman writes on this topic today in the New York Times, Behind the Great Divide —

There has been much speculation why Europe and the U.S. are suddenly at such odds. Is it about culture? About history? But I haven’t seen much discussion of an obvious point: We have different views partly because we see different news.

[via Lean Left]