Add balance to news

People have encouraged me in the past to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal for better news coverage than is available from other sources. Investors, after all, need real news. I have subscribed in the past, but it is very hard to keep up with such a large newspaper, and we leave so much unread that it seems like a wasted expense. They tend to pile up, we never get caught up, and eventually give up.

But there are two other sources of news that offer a counter to the highly filtered U.S. outlets.

One is the Financial Times, which is delivered to us daily with our Denver Post (which does an excellent job of covering the Denver Broncos, and not much more). FT is a thin newspaper, and carries many news stories that U.S. sources don’t. Just yesterday, for example, it carried a front page story of China’s having developed an anti-aircraft carrier missile that is a “game-changer” in the Pacific, according to prominent U.S. military officials. The only other U.S. sources that covered that story were Stars & Stripes, AOL News, and Business Insider.

FT also had a story about the rising of the minimum wage in Beijing, China, and throughout all of China during 2010 to spur demand and add equality to wealth distribution. The only other U.S. source that I found covering this story was the Wall Street Journal. Minimum wage is frowned on in the U.S., and so doesn’t get much ink.

That’s just one day’s news from one source – two stories of interest in the U.S. not available for general consumption.

Another good source of news is Al Jazeera, seen all over the world, and available in the U.S. on Link TV (Direct TV channel 375, and Dish 9410). In a propaganda system like ours, we are conditioned to automatically disbelieve any statements made by our enemies. Al Jazeera is just another news outlet, but since it has an Arab name, is automatically distrusted here in the land of the free. Fair enough – we should watch it anyway, and apply the same distrust to American news outlets.