Information Management

I have been mulling about the distribution of information in the information age. Thus far we have left it up to a few to decide what is news worthy to be reported and what is not. Some items are obviously news worthy, such as the tsunami in the Indian Ocean last month. But in the rush to report, are some reporter crossing the line to create news as when a reporter posed questions for soldiers to ask Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Sometimes even this subtlety of manipulation is lost as with this Medienkrikik report. In other instances reporters have become pawn of newsmaker wannabes such as this incidence on Haifa Street.
Now a day the consumer of news have more choices. Mass media and mainstream news outlet are readily available to all beyond regionalism via the net, perhaps the most apparent example of this is Google News. Certainly consumer choice is a huge step forward and long ago were the days when Henri Ford allows consumers to choose the color of the model-T, as long as it was black. But unlike manufactured items, news is not a passive tool to be wielded as we please, news affect us and has the model to make us the tools. And this is potentially true whether we allow the bias of the media to sway us, or allow our own bias to read only that which agree with us and make us inflexible and potentially close-minded.
Other than to be on constant vigil for bias, external and internal, I do not know how to obtain objective news or whether such is possible. Perhaps it is the next step of enlightenment, just like the acknowledgement of Newtonian physics is not a constant but is subjected to Einstein principle of relativity, that all news is bias and will always be so.