The Real News

The Real News is getting more material. They report differently than I anticipated they would. For one thing, I thought of it as a leftist production, mostly because Jeff Cohen recommended it. But some of the commentators bill themselves as conservatives and voice conservative liberatarian ideas that I did not expect.

All the Real News reports have faces and voices attached, and the way this happens seems very different than Fox or CNN's kind of presentation. Most news items seem to start with a report that sounds built around the traditional journalistic questions "who, what, where, why, and how." But they include or link quickly to commentary by one or another person billed as an expert. Some of these experts are known to me and are people I recognize as experts; others I have never heard of, though perhaps they are known elsewhere or to a different community.

They had a pretty startling report yesterday. One of their reporters had apparently slipped a cell phone with a camara to a Palestinian prisoner in an Israeli prison on the Sinai Peninsula. The prisoner called out commentary and shots of limp bodies strewn over each other in a pile in the prison yard, bodies that may have been shot.

The bodies and other prison scenes went by pretty fast, and I have to say I found it hard to be certain what I was looking at or what the prisoner referred to, even in translation.

I can't recall when I ever had this kind of less mediated or differently mediates information from a news article. But I wonder how you-all feel about this kind of reporting. Does it need more mediation or different mediation? Is it actually mediated more, in a sense, because commentary is available?

To what extent and in what way should this information be edited or mediated?