How I Source My News, Explained
Right now, I am in the process of applying for a second master’s degree in either International Affairs or Global Relations. My dream is to work for either the United Nations or as a foreign service officer, and my passion is pursuing global peace and sustainability. Would you believe me if I told you I didn’t watch the news?
Unfortunately, all four years that I have been in college, I have lacked a television that is connected to cable TV. While I try to blame my news aversion on that, I know there are a number of reasons why I have avoided the news on a day-to-day basis. However, now that I want to get more involved in the world of foreign affairs, I know something has to change.
Without cable TV and an active Twitter account, I decided to turn to various podcasts for my daily dose of news gathering. I tried out a few platforms and found the one that interested me most was Today, Explained. What attracted me to this podcast was the fact that the hosts, Sean Rameswaram and Noel King, delivered the news in what I considered to be a very unbiased, factually-based manner. This is something I had been looking for after feeling bombarded by blatant partisanship and partiality via the nightly news.
The Two-Step Flow Theory suggests that information flows from the media to opinion leaders, and then to the masses. While it may have been common in the past to gather information for oneself, I find myself engaging in the Two-Step Flow Theory when sourcing my news via hosts and news anchors on different platforms. In my mind, I trust them to have gone through all the research and information already and to shorten the public’s learning process by delivering only the facts. On the other hand, if I were to search for information via the internet, I would be concerned about the validity of the majority of the content.
While the Two-Step Flow Theory concept may sound harmless, one drawback is the fact that only a small group of influential people — the opinion leaders — have the utter capability of deciding what is important and relevant enough to be spread to the general public. If one’s opinion leaders aren’t representative of the population as a whole, it is likely that their news won’t be either.