Listening

From the last post I was writing about listening to the conservative radio show podcast of Dennis Prager. I started listening to his show one day, when I was flipping through the radio in my car. I first noticed the station because it was something other than music that I am not interested in listening to. I do not specifically remember the talk show that was airing, but after listening for a while, I became interested. After that, I began listening to this radio station when I drove somewhere. Most of the time I would be going home in the evening, because I wanted to stay later at robotics, rather than getting a ride from one of my parents. Drager's radio show airs during this time, so that is what I would listen to. This would be a weekly routine because I usually only stayed late on Fridays, and his show only airs on weekdays. After the second time I listened to it, he began to talk about something that I completely disagreed about, global warming. After hearing it for a few minutes, I was drawn into the show, because I wanted to understand how he justified his argument. Even after I got home I was still thinking about the claims that he was making. One such argument that he brought up, was about how in Al Gore's movie, Inconvinient Truth, some of the claims he made were not entirely truthful. The issue that Prager brought up, was that when Gore claimed that the the scientific community had complete agreement about whether people are responsible for the climate change, was based on a flawed study by Naomi Orskes. After reading more about this specific study, I found out that what he said had some truth to it. In her study, she said that she used the search term, "climate change," when she really used "global climate change," thus, decreasing the amount of articles that would be relevant to her study. But even if the study may have had a few articles that disagreed with the current consensus on climate change, there is still a strong argument for agreement. Seeing this did not change my opinion but got me to re-examine my opinions.
What this showed me, was that news and the media we come in contact with have some bias. That does not mean that media sources that tend to lean in one direction cannot trusted, but that both reports present some form of what is happening. Nation Public Radio, may interview wounded soldiers, or report about the latest bombing, to present the truth that Iraq is unsafe. But what Fox News, or other conservative media outlets will report on how the government is cracking down on death squads, or how Baghdad is becoming safer after Bush proposed the troop surge. I might draw a conclusion either way about whether the war is successful or not based on which news source I listed to (assuming I accepted everything I heard). When what is really happening is that the insurgents are moving their attacks to focus on areas other than Baghdad, so NPR is truthful about the harm done to people, and Fox is truthful about the reduced attacks in Baghdad. By listening to the conservative stance on current events, as well as the liberal stance, I can get a better understanding of what is actually going on.