In this episode of Survivor Dad, stay at home dad Nathan offers advice on how to make sense of the news. As parents, it's important to stay up to date on world events and the internet provides a variety of sources of information. He shares his thoughts on bloggers and bias, and also reveals a few of the web sites he reads to see what headlines are happening. These sites include The Week, Fark, Drudge Report and Newsvine. He also suggests using news aggregators or RSS feeds to get information from media companies. DadLabs Ep. 793. Survivor Dad Ep. 11.

Survivor Dad: The internet has changed the way people find and digest news content. As parents, it's our responsibility to be as up to date and as educated as possible on the events that are happening in the world that affect us and our children. The internet makes finding that content easy and abundant, but it can also make it much more difficult to discern fact from opinion. First and foremost, bloggers are editorialists. You can find bias in almost any mainstream news story but it's even more omnipresent in blogs. Most of the big political blogs lean one way or the other and it's pretty easy to tell which way. A good blog, right or left, in my opinion links through to other reputable sites to support their claims. Kind of like citations. One of my favorite general news sites that does this is TheWeek.com. They pull perspectives from all sides to provide a bigger picture of the story being reported and there's not a lot of flowery rhetoric. To me, the more extreme the rhetoric the more biased the piece. Heavy rhetoric one way or another is meant to elicit an emotional response and cloud the truth. Heavy rhetoric to me signals a weak argument and the author's trying to compensate with divisive language. I like news aggregators for the simple reason that they are simple. Aggregators typically contain a large variety of stories linked from a wide variety of sites. Some of my favorites include Fark.com. All the links are user submitted and they typically come with a snarky headline that sums up the article. The guy who started this site also wrote a great book on errors in media. I also look at DrudgeReport.com. It's a right-leaning news aggregator but it's also good for getting top headlines. Another user submitted web site is newsvine.com. It's very similar to Fark but without the snarky headlines. One other way to keep up with what's going on are RSS feeds. Most big media outlets have an RSS feed. All you have to do is subscribe and you'll get their stories as they're posted in a column form. As Asher has gotten old, I've found more time at night to follow news stories that interest me. i always try and read as many different viewpoints as possible so I can expose myself to as much differing information as possible. And then I  make my judgements from there. Variety it after all the spice of life and the only way to be truly educated is to open your mind to a variety of ideas.