Does anyone else avoid watching the mainstream news outlets these days? There’s very rarely any good news to be seen, I’ve been looking at some of the more positive news outlets and the smaller services and they seem to be covering a lot of things that the mainstream media don’t touch.

This is something I’d noticed a while ago, but I wasn’t blogging at the time. It’s amazing the stuff that gets ignored by the mainstream media. At the camp for climate change that happened near Heathrow a month or two back, there were incidents of the police using some fairly heavy handed tactics against unarmed protesters, yet this was not even touched on in the mainstream media.  I remember seeing coverage of the event in the press that was in fact hostile to the camp and it’s aims.

That started me thinking, it’s as if the media, at least in some parts, seems to be promoting (or spinning) a particular view of the world. They have a small area of interest, which doesn’t seem to include anything that might challenge the status quo world view, or force people to stop and think.

I think we have to consider the last teaching of The Buddha:

“Therefore, be islands unto yourselves. Be your own refuge. Have recourse to none else for refuge. Hold fast to the Dharma as an island. Hold fast to the Dharma as a refuge. Resort to no other refuge. Whosoever, either now or after I am gone, shall be islands unto themselves, refuges unto themselves, shall seek no external refuge,it is they, among my disciples who shall reach the very topmost height! But they must be keen to progress.”

Essentially we have to judge for ourselves and remember that we, and only we, are the final authority, we decide what is newsworthy. To allow mainstream media to do this for us is to abdicate that responsibility to others, but that in no way absolves us of the responsibility, we chose to give it away. Personally, I find that my RSS feed aggregator is my trusty ally in keeping informed.

I’ve placed a couple of links to positive news sites on my links page, and I’ll update it with links to alternate news sources as soon as I get the time.