Challenge: Capturing and creating the "whole picture" acticle that the public demands

With the convergence of technology and news, I believe it makes it easier for us to get a more accurate view of what's going on in the world. I also think that it is still an area that does not lend itself a lot of credibility. I for one, am not a blog reader. It is just something I have never picked up on, which is why it has even been harder for me to post on this blog. I am also one who has been taught to not take mainstream news too seriously. Where I stand currently is that I have been completely terrible about keeping up with what is going on in the world outside of the college environment. One thing I do know is that when I want to read the news, I always look for a credible source. I usually go to newspaper web sites like the Indianapolis Star with hope that it will not be as liberal a perspective as that of maybe the Washington Post or CNN. Something that excited me in our class discussion is embedded journalism. In a digital photography class that I am taking, I watched a movie about a photographer named Eugene Smith. It was really cool because he worked for LIFE magazine, and he went out with the United States troops during World War II and took pictures for his article. Even though he was there, and could have been a distraction to the soldiers, I believe he put together a good set of photos of the war, but he could not tell the whole story. This makes me think of to things that we cannot avoid in the news. No one is ever going to be able to give a completely accurate interpretation of any serious event in one article, interview, or set of photos, and there is always going to be a bias. News can be more interpretation of the facts than the facts by themselves. Photographic journalists and journalists alike can take photos and write articles about whatever they want people to see and think. In the case of a war, to one extent, it could be fairly easy to make it look like there is not much brutality and we pretty much have everything under control. To another, doing this could be painting a picture of what many people know as true, just by knowing service members in their community who have died etc. I would like to think that most people examine the sources they pay attention to and do not believe everything they hear, but it's not something I can assume. Basically, these ideas just run around in a circle that reminds us that the media can be very deceptive and we just have to choose to consume wisely. Ironically, I just read an article from a university web site saying that the problem with embedded journalism is that the journalists can't get the whole picture. The truth is that we listen to what we want to hear, and we believe what we want to believe. This is something we can handle, if we're willing to accept it. There even seems to be some truth in saying we want the whole picture when the odds are that we wouldn't be able to handle it anyway.