Monday, May 16, 2011

What's True?

How do you get your news? Newspapers. talk shows, cable TV, blogs, Tweets, Facebook, network TV, email, RSS feed, smoke signals?


With more information venues than ever before, and with traditional gatekeepers disappearing, it becomes ever more incumbent on the individual citizen to verify, analyse and evaluate the information he receives.




"Veteran journalists Kovach and Rosenstiel (The Elements of Journalism) begin their intelligent and well-written guidebook by assuring readers this is not unfamiliar territory. The printing press, the telegraph, radio, and television were once just as unsettling and disruptive as today's Internet, blogs, and Twitter posts. But the rules have changed. The gatekeepers of information are disappearing. Everyone must become editors assuming the responsibility for testing evidence and checking sources presented in news stories, deciding what's important to know, and whether the material is reliable and complete. Utilizing a set of systemic questions that the authors label "the way of skeptical knowing," Kovach and Rosenstiel provide a roadmap for maintaining a steady course through our messy media landscape. As the authors entertainingly define and deconstruct the journalism of verification, assertion, affirmation, and interest group news, readers gain the analytical skills necessary for understanding this new terrain. "The real information gap in the 21st century is not who has access to the Internet and who does not. It is the gap between people who have the skills to create knowledge and those who are simply in a process of affirming preconceptions without growing and learning." -- Publisher's Weekly.


Check it out today. PN4815.2 K68 2010

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