Use Critical Thinking when Reading the News

Sometimes it is difficult to find the useful or new information in a news story. Many times journalists hide the actual news withing their own biases. Whether intentional or not, these biases come through. The trick is to extrapolate the useful or new information and disregard the rest.

Let's take the topic of global warming as an example of how biases slip into the reporting and it may be hard for some to find the useful information.

Many articles will talk about new studies which call into question some of the main talking points of the global warming alarmists.

A study conducted late last year shows that the changes in the Arctic are cause by natural variances in wind patterns and non-linear ocean currents. The study was conducted by NASA and went through extensive peer-review.

ANy sane person would consider this important information considering all the recent calls to legislation of "greenhouse" gasses. Well the information did appear in an article in the New York Times, but was buried within several paragraphs of 1 scientist talking about how dangerous "man made global warming" is. Unless you read the article carefully, you might not have seen the new information that is important to the discussion about climate change. Many people may have just read the first couple of paragraphs and then stopped reading because it seemed like just another story about how a scientist think global warming is a crisis.

When reading any article it is important to remember that no matter how hard a journalist tries, their biases always show through. The trick to getting useful and new information is to read the entire article and then make mental notes of the new information and disregard the rest of the information presented in the story. After all, you all ready know the other information.