Florida teen goes to Iraq for school project

[phk]

This is really interesting to me... the question of media bias.

You are correct in saying that all media reflects bias and that it is unavoidable.

 This is because it is written by human subjects who can never entirely seperate their personal subjectivity and ideological motives from objective reality.

It is a dialectical and ideological process in actually "uncovering" the truth. Which makes the process rather tricky, given that everyone is always already ideologically interpellated and that all media caries with it propaganda. (Fox News, CNN; all attack-dogs of the current political parties)

So understanding truth is like detective work. Essentially, taking ideological raw material and refining it.

In terms of understanding media, it comes down to structural analysis. The key is understanding the way in which structures (the political and ideological superstructures and the economic infrastructure) act as forces upon each other in a "complex structured whole."

Thus if we are well informed by the standards presented to us by the average American (we read the New York Times and watch the evening news) we really aren't well informed in any structural sense, as the lack of objectivity or perspective doesn't allow for accurate analysis.

Here's what I do:

I read many papers and journal from various perspectives. I read what the Press agencies put out, namely Reuters; the Corporate Media (meaning media that is profit driven, based upon advertising and thus runs stories that are profitable based upon market analysis). These are NY Times, LA Times; usually gives a perspective of what people that classify themselves as well-informed are thinking.

The journals from both the left and right that offer a fairly solid analysis of events. On the left wing of the spectrum you have CounterPunch, SocialistWorker, New Left Review; on the right you have, The Economist.

You can't stop there either, you have to understand the perspective of the world and the global players, so check out international papers such as the BBC, Al-Jazeera, JapanToday are saying. All of these are burgoise papers so read the proletarian papers like The Militant (Trotsykist) and the RWOR (Maoist, and my personal favorite); these are important for perspective.

But when looking at any international issue check out hte proper national papers that deal with it, and the nations involved. I read such online papers as IRNA (Iran), Gooya (Iran); when I want analyze the leftist student protests in Tehran, which is the event that I have followed for the past few years more closely than other.

Of course in any dynamic system (a system with an excess of variables) no analysis is rock solid. But this is the best method I've come up with understanding events: study history and contemporary reporting, both from as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and then combine this with economic analysis.