Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Educational tours build in time to share and reflect.
Seek out balanced journalism. Assume commercial news is entertainment—it thrives
on making storms (whether political, military, terrorist-related, or actual bad weather)
as exciting as they can get away with in order to increase their audience so they can
charge more for advertising. Money propels virtually all media. Realize any information
that comes to you has an agenda. If you're already consuming lots of TV news, read
a progressive alternative source that's not so corporation-friendly (such as
The Nation
magazine,
www.thenation.com
)
. If you have a problem with entertainment masquerading
as news (along with media that numbs us to violence, objectifies women, and generally
dumbs us down), recognize public broadcasting (radio and TV) as a service worth sup-
porting.
Read topics that explain the economic and political basis of issues you've stumbled
onto in your travels. A basic understanding of the economics of poverty, the politics of
empire, and the power of corporations are life skills that give you a foundation to better
understand what you experience in your travels. Information that mainstream media con-
