People often fail to realise the connection between their political or social views and the media sources they prefer. How one’s beliefs are formed is a bit of a chicken and egg problem when it comes to media sources – which came first, being right-wing or watching Fox News?

But I maintain that if you care (personally or professionally) about getting to the bottom of issues, you will have to select the best possible information sources, amongst them primary sources.

First, you have to face a basic problem: our current media landscape is not helping you staying informed. The New York Times has no real interest in reporting the objective truth. They have an interest in selling their product as often as possible, which means maintaining an effective illusion of reporting the truth for as big of a market of potential readers as possible.

You may think people care about the truth. Don’t be mistaken. Look at which newspapers have the highest circulation numbers: mostly those who have effectively locked down a geographical market or serve a general world-view. And that’s for people who even buy newspapers, who are probably more interested in informing themselves (or at least upholding the appearance of doing so) than the mean.

So when reading newspapers often makes you rather misinformed, what is one to do in order to truly learn about issues one cares about?

Select the issues you truly care about and read primary sources!

You cannot reasonably be well-informed about a lot of issues so you have to select those you truly care about – there is only so much time in a day.

For those issues you do truly care about, Clay Johnson has helpful hints to give. He is the author of a new book, “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption”, in which he makes an excellent point on the importance of reading primary sources:

“All too often, we consume information at the top of the trophic pyramid of truth, and as such, we’re getting only the information that has been selected for us by a network of operators interested not in telling us the truth, but in giving us what sells. (…)

We have to move towards the base of the pyramid if we want to see what’s really going on.”

Let’s focus on a concrete example of what reading primary sources will yield in terms of insights: the recent Wikileaks publication of internal StratFor (Strategic Forecasting) emails.

If you had read every news piece the mass media published about these emails during the first 24 hours of their publication, you would have come away with a lot of misconceived ideas and story-lines about what StratFor is and is not (‘do they sexually exploit their sources?!’) and what information they are privy to.

If you had spent about 2-3 hours reading the actual first 230 published emails, you would have gained very interesting, if a bit superfluous, insights into how an intelligence organization like StratFor actually works (which is similar to how the CIA etc works) and what regional issues they care about. Their analytical guidance e.g. for Germany from 2009 lists Neo-nazi, radical right wing and anti-immigrant violence as the ‘main internal threats to Germany’, which has proven to be very well-founded during 2011.

You would also have learned e.g. the following information, which was mostly not reported in most media reports about the leaks:
- Israel may have already succeeded in destroying most of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure
- Mossad may have contracted out the Dubai murders and the Iranian physicist hit
- Chavez’ cancer may have spread to the lymph nodes and into the bone marrow already and there may be all kinds of shady background deals going on as to becomes the successor
- US Democrats may have committed election fraud during the Presidential election of 2008 in Philadelphia and Ohio
- “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy may have been orchestrated from the very beginning and the Imam may have been an operational asset of the FBI
- Karl Rove may have a close personal/working relationship to Kerry Cammack, whose wife happens to have been elected to the Texas Supreme Court
- Osama bin Laden’s body may have been flown to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda for examinations etc before allegedly being buried in the sea
- French businesses may pay some of the highest bribes in the military procurement business
- Estimates of drug profits from Mexican sources may be wrong to the order of tens of billions of USD
- Turkey may want to lead the Islamic world
- Several mid to senior level Pakistani Intelligence service and military personnel (including a retired General) may have known about Osama Bin Laden’s safe house arrangements; the United States may know which ones
- Russian Prosecutor General / Attorney General may have been a source for StratFor; there may be a lot of specific criminal activity going on in all kinds of Russian institutions
- 1 of 19 Pakistani brigadiers recently promoted to major generals may be a StratFor source
- German Bundeswehr may have failed dramatically in their stabilisation efforts in Afghanistan due to not understanding counterinsurgency operations

All this may or may not be true – given the nature of the leaked emails – but at least you can read the primary sources for yourself and make up your mind about them (insofar as one considers the emails the primary sources in this case and not the StratFor sources/analysts themselves). Journalists instead are often bound by internal guidelines and will not report about certain information at all or may just be under too much time pressure to spend a few hours reading and evaluating. Not to even mention that most journalists don’t really know their covered topics that well – they are just not incentivized to truly know or to care.

Also, these primary sources and the information contained within may or may not surprise the most hardened analysts whose very job it is to stay informed about these topics. Which is a point that is often mentioned in relation to Wikileaks publications – how “there is nothing new” in the leaks. But there is a lot of new information for the general public and most probably for you and me. At least, most, if not all, of this information surely didn’t become public knowledge beforehand.

So if you care about an issue, do not outsource your information gathering. Read primary sources. You will learn a lot and become less misinformed in the process.

Why is everyone still only concerned about company bailouts when the 8th biggest country in the world (i.e. the economy of California) is failing and may soon finally be broke? It’s rated close to junk status, people.

Why don’t more people talk about the Russian-American relations as one of the major future concerns for world stability? Their meeting was a catastrophe. America will be facing its first true tests of its new ways, not just in Iran. And if it’s all “Barack by himself”, they are going to go down.

Why does no one give a sh*t about Muslims and Han Chinese killing each other in the street? Oh, sure, the graduate students and professors believe all is well in China. Well, then, no reason to worry, right? No reason to listen to the man who spent years roaming the country. Because, you know, things obviously are very simple.

What about the United Nations? They are not only not helping anywhere in the world, especially with South Korea and Iran – what with all their ridiculous “condemnations” and such -, they are even actively obstructing progress.

This “world governance” is obviously outdated and not up to today’s tasks of dealing with lots of crooks. John Bolton was probably right about the UN after all. There is a case to be made that it just wouldn’t matter if the building were to be scrapped by half. Have you ever been to any UN convention center and looked at the names of the conventions going on there? It’s astonishing. Hey everyone, the 4th conference on the 2nd proposal of the 11th commission on world peace is coming to town!

Only so many people do not mistake the superficial for the meaning of things. And they are astonished by what this world is coming to on so many levels. Sure, there is lots of hope. But there is also a lot of hypocrisy in this world, which makes people numb and indifferent to more important issues. Thankfully, there are still people, like David Rothkopf, who at least tell the world about some issues the mainstream is not aware of.

I know, just talking about it is second rate. First rate is doing something about it..

Eight months later, a report to the UN about Hariri’s assassination outlined a plot of astonishing complexity: a mysteriously reduced security detail, remarkably detailed intelligence on his movements and the moving of the truck into position just one minute and 49 seconds prior to the convoy passing by – all of this bore the hallmarks of a government-sponsored assassination. It implicated if not Syrian President Bashar Assad directly, then at least his inner circle.

The violent death of a charismatic figure created a huge hole in Lebanese politics – just at the time when there was a rising backlash in the country against Syrian influence in the region and its own territory.

There has been an endless meddling with investigations by the UN – its International Independent Investigation Commission is a farce and most probably a disguise for a politically-agreed “blame scenario” to settle the issue and to further Syria’s standing in the peace process.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise though, that there seems to be a “breakthrough” in tribunal investigations as new evidence – obtained by Der Spiegel, a German magazine – seems to point to Hezbollah as being behind the Hariri murder.

This quite obviously reeks of a political cover-up by the UN commission.

An intact Syrian leadership may be needed to further the Middle East peace process – so it may be deemed inappropriate to implicate it in a murder of such prominence.

Whatever the reasons behind “new” evidence being discovered and dispersed among the press, it sure is surprising that Hezbollah is coming up as the villain for the first time ever.

Then why are obvious questions not being asked? Why are journalists contend to write about a “breakthrough“, when it just reeks of a cover-up and the explanation for Hezbollah’s involvement is far-fetched?

The UN has failed time and time again – just think of the Oil-for-Food Programme, Kofi Annan’s questionable role in it etc – to provide truthful statements about areas of conflict and dispute and has confined itself to obscuring the truth and giving in to political meddling in too many instances.

If someone gets payed, as journalists do, to ask at least the obvious questions and to go beyond face-value and to report about the conclusions they draw, and by all means fails in that respect, then I am not willing to pay money – and more importantly respect – for that kind of journalism anymore.

Consider me utterly unconvinced, dear Spiegel, of your reporting standards.

If a murdered Prime Minister doesn’t seem to call for your highest standards of diligence in reporting, then what does?