Every day we click.  Then we read.  Some people say we only get a watered down version of reality delivered by the conservative editors who’re responding in fear to the media owners and their executives.    I’m not so cynical and backward.  Most Editors I know constantly combat this perception,  and don’t like any exec telling them what they should think or publish. 

Get yourself an RSS feed from an agency you trust.  Like Business Day and FM.   We’re surrounded here by thinking people who argue, never agree and write stuff on a daily basis that’s not controlled by the execs.  

Yet there’s always something missing.  That sting of real news sometimes is absent as we go about our business, delivering news after it happened.  Not enough thinking.

 We also receive vast amounts of information from other sources.  Like our friends at braais.  Consider this.  Which do you trust most?  The newspaper,  web-based news organizations, social networking,  or your pal? 

It’s your pal – with some provisos.  For example.   Pal may not always get the figures stats spot on.   Sometimes pal tells you about the urban myth which he or she has just heard as fact and you know its thumbsuck passed on via email.   But you’re nodding anyway.  Better not to always argue about the one about the machete wielding gangs of xenophobic crazies. 

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There are machines out there written by teenagers that pull content directly from sites and feed them into mobile phone headline services.

So what, says the free marketeer, its out there and we have the right to access information.    And there’s the rub.  Who pays the person who goes out to retrieve the information in the first place? Normally some me dia corporation that is collecting IP. However, that tells only part of the story.  We all believe in the right to access information.. right?

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