Satirist Mark Twain said, ‘If you don’t read newspapers, you’re uninformed. If you read newspapers, you’re mis-informed.’
Deep down, I suspect everyone wants to feel ‘informed’ about what is going on around them. While there’s some people who don’t engage at all with local and global events, we all have a collective stake in outcomes.
I’ve seen people become incredibly interested in their surrounds when they are about to be shaken up by powers greater than themselves.
As an actor in the media landscape, even at this hyperlocal level, there’s an expectation to be across certain issues, or at least be somewhat informed.
I cannot honestly say that I am across everything, and it’s reasonable to be suspicious of those who say they are.
Know-it-alls are such a bore.
So I am confused, for example, whether Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is a good shake-up for the war-mongering elites who run the US government.
The former US Democrat senator is being labelled as a national security threat by the spooks and left-leaning media because of her relative inexperience in the intelligence community, and her positions on Syria and the war in Ukraine.
Gabbard is a Russian asset, apparently. One of the sharpest global political analysts, Peter Zeihan, told his 834,000 subscribers on YouTube this week as much.
I have followed Gabbard for a while. She is a decorated former medic who served in the Iraq war. Gabbard has a solid record of introducing bills that put the establishment on notice.
Dropping criminal charges against whistleblower Edward Snowden was just one bill.
This leads, perhaps, to modern political tribalism.
The cheerleaders of political tribalism are (mostly) corporate media that seek to profit on outrage. Now, more than ever, it’s confusing because the corporate narrative has become so sophisticated it masquerades as ‘independent’ voices.
Ground News
One interesting news source is Ground News.
It doesn’t produce news, it aggregates it from sources that ‘do’ news. Ground News assess trending news as being either a left, centre, or right coverage.
And more than that, it assesses media organisations it aggregates as having media bias ratings (left, centre, right), for factuality and ownership.
The Ground News website says it was co-founded in 2018 by former NASA engineer, Harleen Kaur, and award-winning app developer Sukh Singh.
They say, ‘We are not funded by a media company, big tech, government affiliations nor institutional investors – we are supported by our subscribers and a small group of individual investors who care about the problem personally’.
For the record, The Echo was established in 1986, and is independently-owned by locals.
Hans Lovejoy, editor
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
