How 2, Jane Q? is an occasional series of posts for educating would-be citizen journalists on the various tasks, challenges, and responsibilities they can expect to face while trying to gather and produce news as individuals.

While visiting the Long Beach peninsula a couple of weeks ago, I came upon Counterspin while scanning the local news stations on the radio one morning.

Counterspin is an audio news program produced by FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), a media watchdog organization whose claim to fame is ”challenging media bias & censorship since 1986.”

FAIR is a bit left-leaning, to be fair, but Counterspin came to me as a breath of fresh air after so many years of encountering far more conservative or libertarian views in this corner of the state during my travels there. 

As a middle-of-the-roader politically, I’m not particularly thrilled by extremism on either side of center, so I was pleased to know that these options were at least available in a community where more right-wing perspectives are generally reflected in the local/rural media.

It occurred to me that citizen journalists everywhere should be tuned into alternative news offerings like Counterspin on a regular basis to help them balance out their own biases (we all have them, folks), especially in areas where they are subtly conveyed in local news reportage.

All news sources, no matter from what medium, are shaped by biases, by the way. Every single one of them has a slant, a political perspective. There really is no such thing as objectivity in news reporting. Reporters are human beings shaped by their own biases, and they work for other beings whose lives have been shaped, again, by their own biases. To expect fairness and balance, oversight from the editorial team to control bias, is one thing, but to expect pure objectivity in the news is impossible.

As a citizen journalist, you have to find ways to balance the information and biases you acquire and process while gathering and conveying news in order to avoid falling into such loaded bias traps.

For instance, one really must subscribe to a much larger newspaper (for instance, The Seattle Times or the Oregonian for residents of Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula) if they are to capture a more accurate snapshot of the world outside their small town or even their suburb or smaller city.

I live in a small town myself; I know first hand how rumors spread as fast as real news and it can become difficult and uncomfortable sorting out fact from fiction when your neighbors and friends are involved.

Citizen journalists would do well to diversify all of the kinds of media they glean their news from. Local papers, news radio and regional television broadcast news are good choices—not individually, but as a collective.

I personally don’t recommend a lot of national cable news because the biases they convey to either extreme mean your news intake will be resoundingly one-sided. Television newsmagazine programs are also geared for entertainment, not news, so always be prepared to question the assumptions these programs portray as fact.

And avoid talk shows; I lived in Oprah territory long enough to know that, while Oprah means well, she consistently shows only one side to a lot of hot-button topics. If I learned one thing in J-school, it was “always question assumed values,” and it holds more true now than ever before.

Print media is still my preferred media outlet (books, magazines, newspapers, newsletters) because print is less immediate; it allows you to do the interpreting for yourself in a way that information in a slick broadcast format doesn’t.

Larger newspapers (what are left of them) should be a regular resource to citizen journalists, as well as independent sources in all media formats. These include websites, blogs, public radio, podcasts like Counterspin, regional interest newsletters, and Web 2.0 lead-builders like Twitter and Facebook.

 Blogs, especially, can be good depending upon who’s writing them; be particular and try to sample several with different perspectives in RSS to make sure you’re getting a wide sweep of information.Reading blogs and other Web 2.0 news material also requires that you consider the source and look for what’s not said as much as what is being said. Blogs, while very informative in some cases, aren’t meant to be objective, after all.

Listen, if you’re not sampling all of these myriad media products already, you run the risk of only getting part of any one picture and feeding into the huge pool of misinformation already out there. Think of the floating raft of garbage in the Pacific Ocean as representing all the junk news already out there; do you really want to add more to the mess?

One of the tricks to avoiding this resides in successfully corroborating your information. A.k.a. factchecking. Aside from primary sources (interviews with people, first-hand experience in the field), the next best way to doublecheck your facts and make sure you’ve untangled all of the many webs that some stories weave is to follow up with other published reports from trusted sources. You can’t do this if all you pay attention to is CNN in the morning and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Show in the evenings.

One critical rule of thumb: you can’t always trust what you read or hear, even from trusted sources. So many opinions out there masquerade as facts. They may or may not be accurate.

You may not always be able to sift through all the conjecture, but what you can do is try your best to confirm facts, and the best way to do this is to confirm them through a diversity of sources you trust. That includes the media as well as individuals and, well, going there and seeing for yourself.

Some sources to consider:

OpenSecrets.org
FactCheck.org (check their Tools of the Trade list here for ”A Process for Avoiding Deception,” which should be required reading for any would-be citizen journalist)
Poynter.org

Be wary of the so-called “media watchdog” outlets, by the way. They mean well, but they are usually quite left- or right-leaning, with very few mastering the middle of the road. If anything, choose to follow one from either side of the spectrum just to see how they distort reality through their own biases. It’s really quite a fascinating practice and will make you more aware of where your own biases fall.