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are one of the casualties of the spin wars. Facts, to paraphrase a popular documentary, become an inconvenient truth to be eradicated or ignored in the pursuit of the agenda.

MASS-PRODUCTION, LOW QUALITY

If you do enough exploring and investigation, you'll notice something interesting about the mass media. Despite the thousands of media broadcasters or outlets, the vast majority of them tend to rely on the same few sources. This includes sources like the Associated Press, the Canadian Press, Reuters, and other agencies that specialize in somewhat bland, but timely, news feeds. If you're really careful, you might possibly notice another thing: major media outlets will cross-quote and cite each other as references. This is especially true within a "family" of newspapers owned by a single controlling interest, whereby centralized news gathering is distributed to and through regional news outlets.

What should we make of this? I'd say that a lot of the news we see today is basically a limited series of stories which, while not necessarily false, are heavily reliant on common sources. This makes great business sense for big media, who can cut reporting costs while maintaining output. However, if the central sources make mistakes, then inaccurate information will quickly spread throughout the media. The unfortunate thing is that the first message about a topic that a person hears tends to be the message that "sticks" in the consumer's brain, making inaccurate or lazy reporting very damaging.

WHAT'S A CONSCIENTIOUS NEWS CONSUMER TO DO?

Oddly enough, the best solution that I can come up with to make informed decisions about the news and media that we are exposed to comes from the brainchildren of the corporate world: the MBAs. MBAs have to become experts at researching and absorbing massive amounts of data, just like other graduate-level students. However, MBAs are encouraged to work collaboratively. So, what's an MBA going to do to cope with information overload?

I can describe the answer using two words: study group. MBAs typically join study groups during the course of their degree programs. These groups exploit a key business concept: division of labor. The members of the study group will pick areas of knowledge to specialize in. These experts will provide "study notes" and other relevant knowledge to their team members. It's a simple yet powerful concept that has application can be used within many domains.

My recommendation for those people who want reliable information

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