Spotting Bias and Politicization of Local News Sources - Loyd Auerbach and Dave Boitano

We live in a society that cannot seem to come to an agreement on what is truth and what are lies. People are seeking out stories that back up their beliefs rather than seek out the truths which may undermine those beliefs. We particularly see this on social media, but there are other sites out there which pass themselves off as local news organization which is really just biased sources designed to play upon the needs of people to have their "truths" backed up with like-minded articles. We asked Dave Boitano, a veteran reporter, and Loyd Auerbach, an experienced newscaster, author, and Knowledge & Research Consultant for LexisNexis, to come on the show and discuss the current state of news at the local levels in the US.  While the current situation may seem unique to the 21st Century, there are actually parallels to a previous news era over a hundred years ago. Boitano and Auerbach help explain those similarities, and how information professionals, and readers of "news content" can protect themselves from sources which attempt to present information from a biased view. Information Inspirations Just because you may have access to great information doesn't mean you can do anything you want with it. A current lawsuit brought by the Center for Workplace (CWC) against the Labor & Employment firm of Littler is an alleged example of this. CWC claims that a couple of lawyers illegally took their Intellectual Property and claimed it as their own. Now there's an ongoing $1.65 million lawsuit to take it back. Librarians and Information Professionals can use this example to remind others of the limitations of how we can license and use information properly. Apparently, a reporter may give up their writing, but they won't give up their podcast. A recent episode of Press Box talks about the Substack model where readers pay directly for content and follow their muses. There are a couple of other podcast episodes that we touch on in this episode. To learn more on this topic check out The NY Times' The Daily episode on Brian Timpone's Metric Media Brand (A Partisan Future for Local News?) and Freakonomics Podcast episode on Tara McGowan's ACRONYM Digital Media (Why the Left Had to Steal the Right’s Dark-Money Playbook.) On a side-note, Loyd Auerbach's book, Near Death, was released recently. (more...)