Lol. Yes let's just stop all people from communicating. That will solve everything.
> in western press, one can rarely find an article that isn't full of bullshit
There's plenty of good reporting in the West. The way to get informed is to read many viewpoints and form your own opinion. Stopping all non-government press would be terrible for a country's education, economic development, and general happiness.
And the mainstream press is not to be counted on the good reporting side of things so while good reporting is out there, it is not accessible to the mass. That being the reason why good reporting still exists, because in the grand scheme of things, it does not matter.
A quality education is not spoon fed. It is the responsibility of the individual to educate him or herself. Making media available is only half of the equation
It can be, you just have to be picky about the spoons. It's also useful to avoid relying on a single source of information, a diet of opposing views is healthy.
Self-directed education is probably the best overall, but nobody has time to keep up with everything going on in the world, at some point you have to find trustworthy news sources if you want to be aware of activity outside of your main interests.
Exactly. Self directed education is as much about ignoring information you don't need as it is about absorbing information.
> at some point you have to find trustworthy news sources if you want to be aware of activity outside of your main interests
At many points we need to re-examine already-trusted news sources. For example, the Discovery Channel which lost its ability to be scientific.
To hear even more different perspectives, learn a foreign language so you can read their news or talk to foreigners.
Not everything that you're interested in will end up covering the most important new developments of the day. For example, if you spend most of your self-directed learning focused on learning about physics, you may miss news related to the economy, and it could turn out that there's an important event related to the economy that you should be aware of. In such cases, you will be relying on the expertise of others in the field.
Speaking generally, it's healthy to have a passing interest in many things, as long as you can also acknowledge that your understanding of things you don't spend a lot of time on is likely to be limited.
(I imagine there are also ways of getting information beyond the curated "official news" in China; not living there, I'm not aware of the ways, of course. Perhaps, in China, you have to seek? In America, you do the opposite, you have to filter.)
By "wide variety" you mean those 6 corporations/oligarchies, many of which have been owned by the same families for decades, even centuries (i.e. Hearst)? The "variety" is just targeted marketing. For example, the communications chief at Time Warner (CNN's parent) and the CEO at News Corp (Fox News' parent) are "close confidants" who worked together for 11+ years, even though CNN is often considered "left" while Fox is "right".
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...
If you look beyond TV, you'll find a fair selection of weekly-to-monthly magazines (and even a few independent papers) available, in addition to some foreign publications that are readily available. Honestly, just as an example, I'm looking at the Pulitzer Prize winners, and I'm not seeing too many owned by those 6 corporations / oligarchies mentioned in the Business Insider article. Sure there are "big national" papers outside the big 6 (NY Times, Boston Globe, etc.) that win, of course, but even some smaller regional papers with smaller independent ownership win their fair share.
Social / web media in the US allows instant links to this ecosystem, if you want. And, at the moment, this seems to be free of the mass censorship type efforts China employs. To be honest, I bet in certain demographics, more people get news from Google / Facebook / Reddit / etc. than anywhere else.
That's the good news. The bad news is that portions of the social web are flooded with a lot of low-quality "clickbait" that is more populist. Propaganda? Perhaps sometimes. If not, it's still annoying either way. This you have to filter as well.
The best video on this topic is this fake North Korean mockumentary called "Propaganda" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tLK449NdmA
Just as the Western world see Asian regimes, here's a good mirror back at them.