What Does Your News Say About You

            News is something that we are all exposed to every day in one form or another. It can be on TV, the internet, newspapers, magazines, or even just by talking to people. There are so many forms of news that it is practically unavoidable. News also can be told from many different perspectives, and the same story can be interpreted to mean different things depending on who is reporting it. For example, a conservative news source might have completely different stories than a liberal one, or an American news source like CNN, might have vastly different interpretations of news than a British news source like the BBC. Having so many forms and perspectives of news can be helpful in fully understanding recent events, but also confusing as you can’t tell which sources are trustworthy.

            Keeping track of the news can be a stressful and time consuming activity, which raises the question of, why bother? Except for some local stories, the events reported in the news very rarely directly affect most people’s day to day lives, so why do people feel inclined to keep track of the news? I think there are a few different reasons. The first reason I think people watch the news, is simply curiosity. People find that events that are in no way related to them are interesting to learn about. The second reason I think people keep track of the news, is because even though an event might not directly affect their life, there can be some indirect repercussions. This might be as minor as scheduling events around the weather, or as major as managing your finances based on the stock market. You could continue living your life without knowing about details like these, but you can plan your life more efficiently if you do know about them.

            The news source I observed over the past ten days was the Onion, which is part of a category of news sources that are often overlooked, satire. Satirical news sources report news in a sarcastic and usually less informative style than most other serious news sources, and most of their stories are parodies of actual news stories, like a recent story poking fun at the recent stories of issues with white house security. Since satirical news sources usually contain less information than other sources, they are most commonly used as a source of entertainment rather than news. However, one advantage to reading satirical news sources that I notices while observing the onion, was that it seemed to less bias about political stories than in many other sources. I believe this is because satirical news sources are more concerned with entertaining their audience than spreading their ideas.