They know how we feel, now what?

I'm talking about Bill Moyers, David Brancaccio, Lou Dobbs and all of those they parade before the camera to tell us how horrible our lives are and how much they feel sorry for us.

Until now it has given me a warm satisfying feeling knowing that others feel the way I do, but when it's repeated often enough, a phenomenon of Operant Conditioning occurs called "Extinction." The warm fuzzy feeling wears off because the situation does not improve as a result of being repeatedly exposed to the same stimuli.

The veneer has warn away from these social empathy programs because their messages have been ignored by our lawmakers. They appear to have served no other purpose but devices of attraction for the weak and the weary like myself, to finally at the end of the programs, discover their sponsors, and nothing more.

This is the extent of socially responsible public affairs television. Don't be fooled by public affairs programs, especially C-SPAN's Washington Journal, because it only caters to one's need to not feel alone in the world, and absolutely nothing more.

The one thing all of these programs have in common is that they provide no solutions, and they no longer embarrass our leaders into making good on their election campaign promises.

From now on I'll stick with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, and then switch to Adult Swim on Cartoon Network.

Avoid a Web of misinformation.

Before you take the advice of any mainstream syndicated columnist, take a look at the publisher, then take a look at who owns the publisher.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a database of media ownership at its website.
http://www.cjr.org/resources/

You can google "Who owns CNN?" or "Who Owns ____." Then go to the link above and look at what else is owned by the parent company.

More news links added to site

More news links have been added to the site. One called "abyznewslinks.com" is an index of links to nearly every major newspaper and television news outlet in the entire world.

I started to compile a collection of general sources, but this one kicks butt. There are problems, however.

1. Most are main-stream news outlets.
2. Most of them are probably owned by the governments of the countries they cover.
3. Many of them could be operated by our government.

So one has to be very careful to check the framing of a story from more than one source. A good project for you students out there would be to compare international perspectives on a particular news event.

You can start by looking the news source that is the most distant from a major event, like the opposite side of the planet, and see if there is an article about an even here at home, then work your way around the globe to see other perspectives on the event.