Brain Candy #79 - Looking for Neutrality

As I watch the festivities as we lurch toward the Presidential election this fall, I find that I can no longer rely on traditional sources of information to keep me informed about the candidates. Television is now mere sound bites and infotainment, and radio is worse. Even public television and radio now seem to be lacking. Newspapers could fill the gap, but bias seems to be everywhere.

So what's an interested consumer (and funder) of government to do? Need you ask? The Web comes to the rescue again. There are many biased web sites out there - what I'm looking for is a site that has no obvious bias. Of course, if I share the same bias as a source, I'll think it's unbiased; that's almost an American disease. I don't really want a site that parrots my views, because I'm not sure my views are all that well-founded. I want perspective.

Make no mistake: in the first years of the 21st century, Americans are being manipulated. It isn't just one party, or one interest at work, either. The way it's most commonly done is by the propagation of untrue or partially untrue "facts." People can't properly evaluate a situation if they don't have a realistic view of it. Those wanting to manipulate public opinion can influence people to make "the right" choices if the view that people have of the world reinforces those choices. The proper "facts" make the process easy. To avoid this, we need a way to assess what are presented as facts.

Now a fact spinner will be glad to tell you what you should believe and what you shouldn't - just the situation we're trying to avoid. The best safeguard is to find a site that skewers everybody, with equal vigor. If it doesn't appear to play favorites, it probably isn't. I have a couple of candidates for you. My source for the sites below is the ever-interesting Neat New Stuff on the Net web site at marylaine.com. Visit it if you haven't been there recently.

The first site I'll mention is factcheck.org, the Annenberg Political Fact Check site. It's a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The focus here seems to be exclusively on fact checking, and everybody in the race seems to get his time under the hot lights. Exaggerations, dubious statistics, name calling, omissions of key details, quotes out of context, baseless innuendo and plain untruthfulness - it's all here. The features are interesting, but this site doesn't offer much in the way of new content daily.

The other site I'll mention is the CJR Campaign Desk at campaigndesk.org. It is a product of the Columbia Journalism Review. It isn't strictly a fact checking site. They also offer analysis that seems both astute and unbiased to me. The Democrats are getting a lot of attention - that's logical because that's where the action is right now.

Interestingly, the press comes in for a lot of heat on this site. I think that the mass media has not really done a very good job of following the primary process this time around, relying too much on polls that turned out to be unreliable, and the conventional wisdom of the moment. For instance, a few weeks ago, Howard Dean was the front runner according to the press, and it wasn't expected to be much of a race by most. John Kerry managed a few surprises, and now the press sees him as the Candidate of Steel, with Dean, Clark, Edwards, and the rest just wasting their time. Some of them are beginning to grasp the basic unpredictability of the American voter in 2004, but others are not. Anyway, I like this page. Perhaps you might, too.

I'm going to continue looking for more sites like this. I, and other political junkies, just don't have the sources in the mass media that we used to rely on.