5 Sources for News Info

Although I think that knowing what's going on in our country and the world is essential, I'm sorry to say that I don't consider myself to be very well informed. Never as a kid did I ever find myself gravitating towards the news, but I would always sit down with my parents every night as we watched it with dinner. I feel that since coming to college and being able to live on my own terms for the first time in my life, I've become less involved with current events than ever because of my not needing to watch with my parents anymore. It sometimes makes me subconsciously wonder if it's ok to ignore the news like this, but it all boils down to me never finding it interesting or fulfilling.

However, I do strongly agree that being able to know the truth about what's happening in the world is necessary. If it becomes as difficult as I've been told it is to find non-biased news sources, then there's no telling just how polarized everyone's opinions may become. Throughout my life, I've been able to discover a handful of sources that report good stories, although I don't know how skewed some of the things I've known to be "news" are in truth. These are my 5 sources for how I've gotten the news throughout my life.

1. NBC Nightly News: This is the news I had mentioned sitting down to watch with my parents every night for most of my life. From back when Brian Williams was host, it's the one channel I most associate with "news broadcasting." As I grew up I did slowly begin to learn to watch the news with a more critical eye and, in my opinion, I think this is a very clean source in terms of how they present their stories. Everything is well written and well put together, with a focus on presenting statistical facts and concrete truths about the situations they cover. Throughout the Covid pandemic's early months they dedicated almost their entire runtime to covering as much as they could about how the world was doing as well as what we should be doing to stay safe. In short, I believe NBC to be a very reliable source if someone is looking for objective reporting, and I'm content with calling it my primary source of news consumption.
   
   
   
2. The New York Times: I've never been a fan of reading the paper, but being a New Yorker makes it almost impossible to escape the omnipresent newspaper that is the NY Times. After so much time spent with these papers around my house, I can say I'm utterly impressed with how broad of a scope the Times covers. Business, Arts, The Science Times, Sports, there's a guarantee that if you were to read over everything from a given day's paper you'd have a full scope of topics to uncover about the world that day. (Link to online website: https://www.nytimes.com/)
   
   
   
3. ABC World News: This next one is a news source that I've noticed my parents beginning to transition to rather than just exclusively watching NBC.  The first of which is ABC, which I find is similar to NBC in many ways. Just because of how it's also thorough in its presentation and does objective reporting, I would say that this is, again, a good news source to rely on. I wish I had more to say but I'm finding the words difficult. It seems to be almost a mirror image of NBC's presentation, sometimes even down to the stories they may both report on a given day.
   
   
   
4. CNN: This one is hard for me to consider a "main" source of news for me, but because I'm so limited in what I can say I use for news this one almost earns its inclusion by extension. The reason I have CNN here is because of how it's built into the technology I use, mainly being my mobile devices. Oftentimes I'll be using my phone and CNN will be on display alerting me about some viral story, and again by no means is this something I consider a good way to consume news, but it's still something.
   
   
   
5. Twitter: Again, like with CNN, this one I count by extension. I don't use any social media whatsoever, with the one exception being Twitter which I mainly use as a platform for posting/viewing illustrations. However, being how it's the way Twitter works, I'll always be seeing people retweet about other people talking about big things going on in the world. Furthermore, there is a dedicated news feature in the app which uses actually reputable news sources rather than random people spewing commentary, but I don't use the feature at all. I know that these last few sources are incredibly flimsy, but like I've talked about earlier I don't go out of my way to look for news stories, so my range of sources is incredibly limited in what I can talk about.