News should be a lot easier to get today from mass communication, multiple channels on the TV and endless sources on the internet. Right? Wrong.
It has never been more difficult.
TV is the last place I can find meaningful news these days. News channels are not exactly news channels – they are corporate owned TV channels designed to get a generation of potential couch potatoes hooked to it so the channel gets higher ratings, and therefore, higher revenue through advertisements of insignificant junk. The economic driving force – the prime mover – is junk goods that the industry aims to dump on the drugged public. That is what drives most channels including the news channels. They do not search out news that should be relevant for humans, or the planet. They manufacture news when needed, only to fuel “hot topics” of useless trivia.

I stopped watching TV a long time ago. A movie, of whichever country, could be somewhat better. It does not pretend to give you news and it does not contain the irritating insertion of unwanted advertisements, and it provides a make belief feel good story.

But that is only for entertainment and not for acquiring news. Why do I need news in the first place? I need it because, at least to me, it feels important to be aware of what is going on around me in this universe. I feel connected when I can relate to the events that happens around, which may affect not just my life, but even the life of other humans, other vertebrates, other multi-cellular organisms, or the landscape or the biosphere. I am part of the whole. Therefore, I wish to know about the whole.

So, if one does not watch TV any more, what then?
Newspapers ? Forget it.
The days of independent newspapers are over. All the major papers across the nation and across the continents are owned by a handful of corporations. News through the newspaper is centrally controlled by profit generating market oriented thinking. News is not doled out to educate the reader. It is a commodity sold to make profit. If the news sells, it is printable. If it does not sell, it is not news.

Therefore, in Canada, the disenfranchisement of the African bushman tribe, and their decline, starvation and possible extinction is not a salable news. But, how fat an average American junk food eating woman is, is a salable news.

Or, how Israel is being threatened by Iranian designs of possibly wanting to develop a nuclear deterrent of their own, and therefore why Iran is asking to be bombed – is salable news.

Why Canadians continue to go to Mexico for vacation, while there is so much of violence and illegal drug dealing, is salable news.

Try to find out an analysis of the plight of the blackfeet Indians straddling USA and Canada, or the rate at which first nation young women are being lured into substance abuse – you will have a hard time finding this news on local papers. More importantly, you will not find average Canadians getting excited and raising this topic to a major national level debate. A first nation teenage mother selling its baby in order to buy the next round of drug is not popular news. Therefore, this news does not sell. Therefore, it is absent from newspapers.

Take the current crop of news on the mainstream media. The list may go like this:

More hiring in USA but unemployed rate remains unchanged. This is typical junk news and irrelevant. There is no economic recovery. The root cause of the economic meltdown is never discussed seriously. Therefore, what constitutes a meaningful step towards correcting the economic downturn is left vague. And then this kind of snippet news is fed like daily snacks to a group of fish in an aquarium.
A to Z guide to March madness – all about college basketball. Hardly an earth shattering news – but the news outlet decides to call it March madness

A documentary detailing the brutality of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony has gone viral on social media (independent or alternative news circles). It has 50 million hits in a few days. It has increased groundswell of public awareness and possible pressure for Government involvement in his capture. A month ago, nobody knew of Joseph Kony. Today, he may be among the most wanted man. This is a good example of news coming to mainstream through the back door – after everybody already knows about it and after it has already become a major public debate.

Europe welcomes huge Greek debt deal – another piece of junk news that does not tackle root issues, and only offers bogus surface views.

High profile attorney calls for prosecution of Rush Limbaugh – another example of junk news.

Jennifer Aniston wears leather leggings for Joe Leno – huh ?

So, where does one go?

Clearly, the choices, at the moment, seem to be what is known as alternate sources. Some call it counter-current. I suppose it means counter to the current trend.
Unfortunately, there may not be a single source that covers relevant topics of all kinds from all corners. One needs to keep track of a number of sources – web sites that cater to single items – for example the plight of some indigenous people somewhere, or one organization engaged in one social activity at one location.
There may be a million such small sources. They are not even listed properly in one location and circulated widely. One may never even know of the existence of one such source tucked away somewhere.
One way to describe the current state of affairs may be – information overload.
Our senses are dulled by repeated bombardment of junk news from all directions. The brain feels stuffed by it. We feel sated.  Our appetite for searching out new news is therefore kept perpetually at a reduced level. We are living not just on junk food, but also on junk news.

If a person is still desirous of finding independent real news, one can of course search through alternate channels, such as google search. Unfortunately, even that might be filtering some of the news out, due to pressure from one authority or another. Recently, even the Government of India summoned google and Facebook for example, to demand that they filter out what the Government perceives as undue criticism of its conduct. The Government probably calls them unfair and derogatory remarks by individuals. You might call them free speech. Add to all this the fact that ‘terrorism’ looms large in our collective psyche, thanks to incessant harping of this issue over the last decade, as if man only invented terrorism in the year 2002 and before that, only honey and milk was falling from the skyBut, going back to the topic – where can you search out proper news? There may not be any easy solution any more. But there are alternatives.
One could begin to search out like minded folks as a start, and try to hang out with them, in real life, as well as virtually. They might lead you to the water. There are hangouts around, and most are open to public. Some are simply blogs which you can read and comment on. Some are hangouts you create and invite like minded folks to join in. Then there are NGOs, or non-Government organizations that are engaged in good work.
I picked up Vandana Shiva’s case that way, and ended up speaking with her once on her work. I came to know Association of India’s Development that way. I came to know of Madhusree Mukherjee because her book on Churchill was available as an audio book. I spoke with her, and through her, I learned about Debal Deb and Felix Padel.
I searched out themes and subjects within google plus and begin to follow interesting people that post there on say, anthropology, climate change, or sustainability. Sometimes I comment on some of their posts. Sometimes, they add me to their circle. Gradually, you create an ambience around with content of your own choice. You create a newsfield that filters out junk and lets in the type of information you consider worthwhile.

So, what are the results, in my particular lifeWell, on a scale of one to hundred, if I have a hundred persons in my virtual world as friends, I still have ninety that are acquaintances from personal contact. They include people I know from childhood or met up somewhere and stuck a friendship at that time. They include relatives. They moved from my real world, to my virtual one.
But this ninety percent do not supply me with news or activity that so attracts me. They do not really share my interest, nor my world view. This is where the remaining ten percent comes in.
In a way, my world of news could still be awash with people that do not stimulus to my crave for information. They are there to anchor me to my physical past and to send personal tidbits time to time – like news about a relative getting married.
It is the rest ten percent that provide the chemistry and the wavelength in the information that quenches my virtual thirst. As to inspiration, this ten percent is also a source, but not the only source. There are more sources of inspiration than just people on my social network. Writers that wrote books that enlighten and inspire me are one. People that speak on U tube or podcast, or  write blogs, or articles on magazines, and still others. People I might meet by chance somewhere who may not be well known, but whose perception, observation or comments profoundly affect me – are the random sources.
So, in a way, I live among the 90 but search out the 10. It is almost like what Tagore wrote a century ago – সব ঠাঁই মোর ঘর আছে আমি সেই ঘর মরি খুঁজিয়া।
But wait – I did mention eBooks, audio books and the Gutenberg project, did I not? Electronic publishing, bot on written format and spoken one, had exploded on us. Without it, I doubt I would have had the time to read, for example, Madhusree Mukherjee’s book on Churchill’s action and inaction during the Bengal famine of 1943. I would not have been able to reread the extensive writings of Charles Darwin on evolution of the animal kingdom and about the descent of man. I would have left Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Emil Zola, Mark Twain and a lot of others alone simply because I did not have the time.
With audio books, I found something constructive to engage in while driving to work and driving back home, five times a week. Turnover of book I read ( or listened to) every month increased dramatically. And since I was not particularly fond of fiction, my percentage of non-fiction reading shot up. These books, to me, were pure knowledge – or news at a different level.
Take the Indo-Aryan controversy. A very fat recent publication, covering both sides of the argument that Aryan people might not have invaded India four or five thousand years ago but instead might have been of indigenous stock. Covering more than a dozen world renowned experts on the topic, both for and against the Aryan invasion theory, both Indian born and non-Indian – is an exhaustive document meant for the scholars and professionals on the subject, but also for serious amateurs. I have an eBook version of it that takes no space other than my iPad, which also holds a hundred other such books. It is only about 8mm thick, or one third of an inch thick. It helps me refer to specific chapters and articles to it at almost any time, and it includes all the photographs, sketches and other tabulated data, apart form textual matter. I might not have been able to refer to it so often and so easily, had I not the eBook version along with the printed one.
My interest in human genome was perhaps first stoked by George Gamow and Isaac Asimov. But my reading of the book “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins had a profound effect on my understanding of where I came from. It, along with further interaction with people involved on the subject resulted in me sending my tissue samples to an US Genetic lab for analysis of my own genes to trace paternal and maternal ancestry, which in turn further reshaped by idea of where I came from and how.
More recent audio books on the human genome, covering chapter by chapter explanation of each of the 23 pairs of chromosomes has enriched my understanding of the living blueprint of not just ourselves, but the entire history of the evolving design, from the simplest to the most complex, contained within ourselves.
Online publishing of books through electronic media has changed so much in the last decade that I am even reading a book circulated free of charge about how to publish your own book online without much of a cost and have the option of a potential reader simply buying the eBook by downloading it, or to have a print-on-demand function where the store will only print a book when order for same is received. The guide book that explains all this, in 143 pages – is free of charge. I only read it at lunch breaks in office, and have covered the first 18 pages of it.
I am also reading about the 10,000 year explosion, a book that explains how the advent of civilization and its complexity has reportedly accelerated the genetic code building in humans in the past 10,000 years. How blue eyes, or lactose tolerance, are both a very very recent development in humans, and how that might have come around.

10,000 year explosion, by Cochran & Harpending

Since I got interested in the genetics of the living and the extinct world, I started reading another eBook named The Molecule Hunt – Archaeology and the search for ancient DNA. On my iPad, it is a 723 page document and I am now on page 298.
Take the book on British Columbian Geology. It taught me why Burgess Shale is on top of a mountain in British Columbia and yet provides the worlds best fossil bed for the earliest of life forms that happened in shallow tropical seas at the equator in the Cambrian period, more than 500 million years ago.
All this information, to me, is variations of news. To me news is description of a combination of events that happen at the present and events that happened in the past, providing a connection and a trend. It proves the link between now and then. Projected properly, in could try to predict what might happen in the future.
So, my ten percent world is not quite empty, nor is it drab and uninteresting. It has texture, shape and colors. It is a kaleidoscope that covers the length and breadth of my interests and concerns. It keeps my brain ticking away. As a result of this ten percent, my outlook to life is forever shifting and turning and fine tuning itself. It connects me with the rest of the whole.

It balances out my other 90 percent.

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