Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Bill Moyers Answered My Question During Live Chat

Bill Moyers, host of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, is one of my most respected people. He's having a live chat at this moment on PBS web site. Many people have submitted questions, and I did too, expecting only a slim chance of being picked for answer. But amazingly, he picked mine and gave the following answer. That made my day today.

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2:13 pm EST
Lisa:
Where do you get your news among gazillions of sources? Any strategy to overcome information overload?

2:21 pm EST
Bill Moyers: Every morning I read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and segments of the Washington Post -- to get a sense of how they are playing the same stories as well as their own original reporting. The Times has done superb coverage on the Great Collapse (my term for what's happening to us.) I spend a couple of hours on several Website--starting with talkingpointsmemo.com (TPM.com), going on to townhall.com to see how the conservative base is responding to the news and alternet.org and/or truthout.org for the liberal perspectives. I graze all day as time allows across a mulitude of sites --news and opinion --and check in occasionally with the AP and Reuters. I also have several newspaper among my "favs" -- Los Angeles Times, Times of London -- that I will visit over the course of a day. I still prefer magazines stacked beside my bed, however -- and right now they include Harper's, Reason, National Review, The American Prospect, In These Times, Mother Jones, the Economist, the New York Review of Books, YES, and the quarterly of the East Texas State Historical Society. I don't have a strategy for managing the information overflow except to read what I want and then ask myself, with the computer off and the magazine closed, what do I thik about what I've just read? Well, actually, I find good movies a great antidote to overanalyzing the news.

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