Internet vs. Newspaper: Opinion vs. Fact

In his article ‘Bad Days for Newsrooms’, Chris Hedges says that the Internet is “strangling” newspapers. People just get on the internet and browse the newspapers’ websites or get information from the internet and bloggers. He elaborates on his belief that newspapers are unfortunately being replaced by stating that most reporting is done through newspapers and wire services and with that being shut down, we now have bloggers and biased internet sites to get our information from.

When people get their information from the internet instead of the news, we get everything “filtered through an ideological lens,” Hedges states, and that just reinforces our beliefs, instead of giving us the straight facts. I think we need some source of pure information, other than everyone going and hearing biased and skewed stories and believing it as fact instead of opinion.

Another problem that he pointed out was that “the rise of our corporate state has done the most, however, to decimate traditional news-gathering.” Big corporations, like Time Warner and Viacom, control what we read, hear and see and they aren’t concerned with society getting the real news because that doesn’t benefit them in any way. Hedges put this in very interesting words in his article: “[Corporations] hate news, real news. Real news is not convenient to their rape of the nation. Real news makes people ask questions.”

Clive Thompson’s ‘New Literacy’ was an intriguing contrast to Hedges articles on the Internet. While Hedges seemed to only attack the internet and it’s effect on our literacy and the newspaper, Thompson gave us a reason why the internet has proved useful. His point that the internet is simply changing the way we think about writing and actually making us write more often was well supported with the studies by Andrea Lunsford on writing. I think that, even though they discussed slightly different topics involving the internet, Thompson’s ideas were more strongly supported and logical sounding than Hedges’ articles.