Comment There is no such thing as 'objective media'. (Score 5, Insightful) 431
Even if they try their best to do this. Every article, blog post, every news program always reflects point of view of whoever created this content. Even if such person tries his/hers best to be as objective as possible, it is impossible to avoid bias.
The only truth is what you see yourself which is of course impossible for practical reasons. The second best approximation is to snort though raw footage and original materials. This is very time consuming task and it is also impractical for anyone who is not a professional investigative journalist.
This brings us to preprocessed and prepackaged information spewed by either mainstream or alternative media. What works for me is to assume that they all have a lot of spin in their content and that every spin doctor uses at least partially true arguments supporting his/her position at first, is quiet about arguments contrary to his/her position and resorts to lies and fabrications only if all other alternatives fail. So I'm trying to read arguments of all adversary sides (US media, european media, russian media, chinese media, iranian media) and then use my head to sort out things - pretty much 'Scherlock style' deduction. Unfortunately this requires some time and effort, which most of people do not want to expend.
Very unpleasant thing about this is that western media perform very poorly in this regard, especially since run-up to Iraq war. I attribute this to general situation and 'lack of good arguments' on western side - which directly correlates to our latest economic (2008 crash and afterwards) and social (rise of police state) troubles. We now see things going from bad to worse: UK blocking PressTV, UK government forcing Guardian to destroy its computers, now UK PM threatening all newspapers if they do not obey his demands. The same in the US: Obama prosecuting and jailing more than twice as many whistleblowers as all his predecessors combined, US blocking RT, huge assault on journalists, with some of them propably murdered by government thugs to silence and send a message (Michael Hastings). We are certainly not better in this regard than government controlled eastern media and I suspect we might even crossed point of no return in our way have only to strictly controlled, totalitarian media spewing nothing but lies and propaganda.