Take Your Facts With a Grain of Salt...

We're taught that we live in a free country where the media is allowed to express whatever they want to express, as long as it's true. This in turn implies to many people, that the media doesn't lie, and they put all of their trust into their newspapers and their televisions to get the facts on everything from food safety, to electoral decisions, to global politics.
We are essentially a free country, and we're certainly free to express our opinions. But our media aren't quite as free and unbiased as one would think.
Take a look for instance at the difference in reporting styles between Conrad Black's National Post and the CBC.
You'll find that the Post frequently attacks socialist ideals and boosts conservative ideals shamelessly. They tend to cheerlead for things like war, corporate tax cuts, private health care to name just a few. They report facts that find in favor of these things, and tend not to present a balanced argument, ignoring the detriments of such ideas.
The CBC goes the other way. It's war reports will often focus on the civillian cost of our military actions abroad, the corporate motivations behind aggression. They'll report on the growing number of people affected by poverty, the downside of private health care, and the importance of support for the arts. This probably best exemplifies the 2 poles of reporting in Canada.
It's important to realize that if you only rely on one source for your information, you're only going to get a fraction of the facts in any given situation. In Canada, the majority of newspapers are owned by Conrad Black, who is openly conservative elitist. If you wish to debate with your conservative friends to convince them to put humanity ahead of profit, it's crucial that you source facts outside most Canadian and American newspapers. This article details the extent to which the media in Canada is controlled by political agendas.
I recently read a National Post article about Jack Layton's plan to divert funds from Tory corporate tax cuts to benefit Canadian families with child care payments of up to $400 per month. The article was blatantly fear mongering, suggesting that cutting corporate taxes would spiral us into the same economic collapse that the US is undergoing. This logic is of course flawed. It implies that the way for us to avoid a US style collapse is to engage in exactly the same kind of conservative/republican economic strategies that led to the collapse in the first place. But there is little mention of that.
In the US the media bias is even worse. Rupert Murdoch runs over 200 major US dailies as well as Fox broadcasting. He sat on the council of PNAC with Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, John Ashcroft, to name but a few. GE, a major arms manufacturer and US defense contractor owns NBC and MSNBC. CNN and ABC are owned by Time Warner, which also owns Disney and Sid R. Bass which holds major shares in big oil. CBS is owned by Westinghouse, another major corporation. #1 on the board of directors is Frank Carlucci, also of the Carlyle Group. You may have heard of the Carlyle Group, it's an investment firm with a big interest in defense companies, featuring George Bush Senior as one of it's biggest advisors. Recently they've refocussed on media acquisitions.
Anyway, it's election time people. Make sure you are getting facts paid for through research and integrity, rather than facts paid for by corporate and political sponsors with a vested interest.
Simply reading the newspaper and calling yourself informed is to take all of your facts from Conrad Black, a man currently rotting away in a US prison for defrauding the people that trusted him with millions of dollars. Would you trust this man with your country, the country that your children will one day inherit? Inform yourself properly, get the full story.