by Richard George

Created on: February 21, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Making informed decisions usually implies that you have all the relevant sources any comment or news item to hand. In many cases we, as private individuals, do not have these details, or could possibly have. Therefore, by the nature of reading, observing or simply listening to news, we as part of the public are always going to need to use some level of judgement.

We all make decisions every day, and this is usually as a gut (read "emotive" or "emotional") reaction to what we read, hear or see. But these gut reactions are relative to our own individual experiences.

So really what needs to be done is to take that emotional reaction out of the equation when deciding on the validity of some news items and broadening our knowledge of as many of the issues as possible and sifting through what are facts and what are actually other people's reactions and interpretations of those facts.

Whether to trust the media, in all its incantations, also provides a problem which is now global, mainly due the advent of the internet, but also due to editing from the different news agencies that need to fit in a number of stories within a limited timeframe (in the case of broadcast media) but also within a limited amount of space (in the printed form, whether this is electronic or paper copy).

Also, the need to compact news into smaller bites, is not so much a dumbing down of news but the need for many broadcast media operators to fit in more news, as the thirst for knowing what is going on in every part of the world is growing year by year.

One other thing that we also need to take into account (and this is from a purely personal pessimistic point of view) is that all the different media, is not just geared to disseminating information, but also, in many cases, and not necessarily in all, is to make money from advertising and from sales of their publications, and/or their cable or broadcast rights of such stories. This puts many media organisations at a crossroads.

For example, if you have a great story about a celebrity or about a famine, or about a war, what is going to help you sell that story in the best way? Images, sounds or printed words or a mixture of all three. What is going to have the biggest impact, what is going to impact on your audience the most, and what is going to provide you with the biggest advantage over your competitor. And, in many cases, what is going to encourage your viewers, listeners or readers to come back time and time again.

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