Huge crowds attend anti-Putin demo

Maybe, maybe not.

Depends a lot on where you get your news. Most European news sites claim that the pro-Putin demos were much larger.

Some American news sites lead the story with "huge crowds brave bitter cold to demonstrate against Putin."

The New York Times' site leads the story "In biting cold, protesters pack the center of Moscow." Always hedging their bets, they don't tell you which protesters. Presumably it was just as cold for the pro-Putin crowds as for the anti-Putin crowds.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post. News is bullshit.

There are real people behind all these sites and in every newspaper and on every TV network who decide what they're going to tell you and how they'll tell it. They decide what to leave in and what to leave out. They decide what's newsworthy in the first place.

And, being human, every single one of them has likes and dislikes, favorites, biases, and, for lack of a better word, an agenda. "Objectivity" is a bullshit myth that doesn't exist outside of journalism schools.

None of which is a put-down of journalism. It's a tough gig. And that myth of objectivity is at least a nice point of departure.

But it's not reality.

So how do you know what to believe? You don't. But if you care, (and I realize that's a big "if") you should try to see every news story from as many different perspectives as possible.

So check out Fox News for the right perspective.

There are no mainstream left perspectives in American media, but CNN and the major TV networks can give you something Fox would call liberal.

Most right wing European sites are well to the left of CNN.

Al Jazeera is a great network but totally unreliable on any issue that pertains to the ruling elite in the Gulf.

And so on. Look around. Find out what other folks on the planet are reading and thinking and talking about. What do the people in Iran see every day? Israel? China? India has a massive English language media that encompasses the complete spectrum of political thought.

There's no excuse for ignorance.