The Times To Read

FTLComm - Tisdale - Sunday, May 4, 2002

Staying informed is one of the duties of being a free citizen in a free country. We have long suggested here that the centrally controlled and editorially biased nature of the major owner of Canada's news papers makes them virtually useless. Similarily, the domination of advertising and the vested interests of the advertisers pretty much rules out objective journalism on television and to some extent on comerical radio. Canada's nationally owner broadcasting company, the CBC on radio is a good source of daily news happenings but with their tight budget they no longer have international correspondence digging up stories for us and we are left to find other means of determining what is and what has been. I have found two interesting sources and rely upon them heavily. The Guardian as it appears on its outstanding web site gives a reader a good perspective of world news from the British point of view and seems to have less self constraints about discussing things that might be viewed negatively by any government in the world. The second source comes to my computer screen each and every morning and I can quickly decide if I want to check out a story or just dump the whole thing. When you go to the New York Times web site you are required to log in. There is no associated cust with this but what it does to is put you on their mail list and they send out a quick summary of each day's page like that on the right here. The main stories are there and a line to describe the story. I find it a good way of keeping up with things from that American point of view and of course I am most interested in the OP-ED pieces at the bottom as these writers are among the top people in the world and their opinions matter. Several other newspapers does this sort of service. I noticed that Australian and some British papers do e-mails like this one and I expect some independent Canadian papers will do the same in time, some maritime papers are already trying the idea out. The most important thing about new is that it should be current and offer the reader some interpretation of the event so that it makes sense to them in their world. If you want to try this service out just go to a New York times story, log in and from then on you will get the little daily email which you can kill at anything.