Brain Fertilizer

People who know me fairly well have probably heard me rant against the choices of news media available to us in this country.

Despite the insistence from fairly liberal/leftish people that CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast news channels are unbiased, I get tired of having to constantly read between the lines and discount the liberal spin of those outlets.

Sure, I feel that way because I'm conservative. So I guess I'm supposed to listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Fox News and take my marching orders from some as-yet-unidentified marching-order-channel run by Karl Rove or something. Nope. I don't like Rush Limbaugh and don't listen to the radio in any case. I don't like Bill O'Reilly, and I don't really like the stories that Fox chooses to highlight.

So what do I do?

Well, up until recently, I've been forced to engage in "defensive reading" of CNN and BBC, in which I throw out anything that isn't actually a fact and try to remain hypersensitized to editorializing juxtapositions.

But Matt Drudge's website (no link, you can find it yourself) has recently been linking articles from apnews.myway.com
I didn't really like AP much before, but they have improved quite a bit. I've really been impressed by the way they merely report the news without trying to score points for liberals. Well, they've recently demonstrated to me that they also are capable of taking the next step and providing unbiased context on contentious issues. Check out this excerpt:

Democrats call Bush's job creation record the worst of any president since the Great Depression. Since Bush took office, 1.84 million jobs have been lost, but after months of dismal job growth, the nation's employers in March added workers at the quickest pace in four years, swelling payrolls by 308,000.

Even so, the unemployment rate inched up a tenth of a point to 5.7 percent as more people were encouraged to start looking for work again but failed to find jobs.

To me, that aptly and fairly sums up both sides views, gives you the actual facts relatively bare of editorializing (although the "dismal" job growth comes close to ruining it...but it's still far better than CNN or the New York Times, overall), letting you make your own decision which aspect is the most important.

That's where I go for news, now.