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Be a discerning news watcher



 

 

I grew up in southwest Detroit, not far from Tiger Stadium, where the Tigers played baseball and the Lions played football. I went to Holy Redeemer grade school and I was given the chance to go to an all-boys seminary for high school. I jumped at the chance. The high school was a boarding school located in a farming community in Wisconsin. Imagine, if you can, the culture shock of going from living in the inner city to a rural farming community. Many of my schoolmates were also from large cities throughout the country like Chicago, Kansas City and St. Louis to name a few.

Being from large cities like Detroit meant that we all had major league sports teams that we followed and when you considered the diversity of the student body, it was no wonder that loyalties were strong and rivalries were inevitable. But back then, no team had the fan support like the NFL Green Bay Packers.

The Green Bay Packers, with their legendary coach, Vince Lombardi, had won the very first Superbowl and they would win it again in the January of my freshman year. The fans in Wisconsin were not just enthusiastic about the Packers, they were rabid!

We could always watch the Packers play football on Sunday by tuning in the local TV station. Often, the Packers would play a team from the city where a large group of my schoolmates lived, like the Lions, and that would always raise the stakes of the game. But as much as we enjoyed watching the game on TV every Sunday afternoon, nothing came close to the anticipation of reading about the game in the local newspaper on Monday.

The article was usually relegated to the front page of the sports section. There, in big bold type, would be the headlines. We all scrambled to read those headlines! Packers STOMP Lions, 17-14. Then the next week, (Chicago) Bears SQUEAK past Packers, 21-3. Back then, the paper was an unabashed and unapologetic supporter of the Packers and the paper was pretty much expressing the opinions of ANYONE who called Wisconsin home.

I discovered early in my life that you really CAN twist a story to meet your own narrative. Facts are facts, but you can always put a spin on them and dress them up to suggest a particular notion otherwise. Just watch or listen to the news outlets today.

Tell me where you get your news and I’ll tell you if you are Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. That’s because we have so many sources for our news today and so many choices that one would naturally gravitate to an agency of like mind. Gone are the days when we all gathered around the television to watch the evening news and only had three stations to choose from. Today, we have so many different sources of news and each one of those sources is prone to shape, spin and even distort the news in every effort to relay just what we want to hear and how we want to hear it.

Describing the assault on the Capital as a “peaceful demonstration.” Espousing the “stolen election.” What about the “microchips” the government has placed in the Covid vaccine?

Over the past few years, I have made it a point to listen to various sources of news. I listen to and/ or watch Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, PBS and the BBC. Tune in to different news agencies reporting the same news and you will soon notice that every agency has its spin. Sometimes, it is very subtle. Other times, like the paper reporting the Green Bay Packers of old, it is unabashed and unapologetic. Sometimes, it’s not even based in facts.

We owe it to ourselves, our families, and our community to critically discern news reporting. Today, if we rely on one source of news for all the information that’s being reported, then we run the risk of enabling a one-sided, monolithic approach to reporting that will continue to polarize us and diminish our capacity to discern for ourselves what is important, what is critical, what is fluff and what is simply just not true.