Just what are we sponsoring? Contributor George Simpson takes a sobering look at the content your ad dollars are supporting.

If you are like me (and if you are rapidly aging, broken down by old athletic injuries, harassed by your kids and think they don’t build them like Catherine Deneuve anymore, then you are) you subscribe to far too many online publications in a desperate attempt to keep up to date with the changing world of media and advertising.  If I had to give them all up and pick just one, it would be I Want Media, a wonderful site and daily compendium of media news pulled together by Patrick Phillips, who I am convinced never sleeps since his early morning e-blast always has timely and important headlines and links to stories well worth a read.

Patrick was doing this long before there was any money in it and doesn’t charge for his e-blast, so I hope by now he is making a grand living off advertising.

The other day the lead story in his e blast was:

What Ever Happened to the Big Media Boogeyman?

Remember when the media giants were ready to take over the world? In today's Age of Abundance -- with the internet, iPods, mobile devices -- traditional media providers are in big trouble.

Consider this story from Techcentralstation.

When you click through to the story, you get a byliner by a senior fellow at the Progress & Freedom Foundation.  He makes some interesting observations and comes to the conclusion that FCC regulations are hurting traditional media companies in the new world of podcasting, RSS, blogs, et cetera.  If you are like me (and you can’t reverse the aging, fix the injuries, control the kids or know you will catch hell from your wife for that Catherine Deneuve comment, then you are) you file away the information and return to read other stories from the list.

But part of my job is to go where no man has gone before and explore websites that might want to hear news from my clients.  So I took a much longer and harder look at Techcentralstation and found that it is a Trojan Horse for a Washington-based lobbying firm working on behalf of some major corporate media companies. And that the story that ran today and the site’s archived stories are all thinly disguised essays to try and sway public opinion towards their client’s benefit. In fact, the lobby firm apparently has a history of mounting “grass roots” efforts to support its clients (including letters from dead people and from towns that don’t exist).

So, the story highlighted in I Want Media, isn’t news, it is opinion. So what?  Lots of articles in lots of services that aggregate stories are opinion.  Opinion by its very nature is designed to present the author’s point of view (POV) in such a way that you not only agree, but perhaps take some sort of action in harmony with the POV.

Most responsible news organizations try to help readers differentiate between reported “news” and bylined “opinion.” But thanks to the internet, we are passing into a new age of “citizen journalism” where there are as yet no rules to help readers distinguish between fact and opinion.  As we increasingly rely on the web for our news, we are increasingly unable to know if what we are reading has any basis of truth to it.

Nielsen//NetRatings found that a significant 21 percent of web users who read newspapers have transferred their readership primarily to the online version. Think of all those who don’t even bother with newspapers anymore, especially the young.

The more we consume, the less time we take to check the ingredients.  And online is a dangerous place for the truth, because it is much too easy to forward opinion to hundreds of people who don’t have the time or inclination to check the source of the data (think of the days when we all passed along those URGENT warnings about “dangerous” code in our registries without first stopping to check and see that they were hoaxes).

This might be a baseless worry since studies have repeatedly shown that people tend to watch/read “news” from organizations that most align with their personal POVs.  How else can you explain how FOX ever found an audience?  So, we have to assume that whatever you’ve bookmarked makes you happy and the facts be damned.

As a keen student of revisionist history, I appreciate that what might be “fact” today can be tomorrow’s fiction, so finding the truth is perhaps a fanciful mission to begin with.  But it is important not to be lured into complacency by the ease with which one can access “news” and “opinion” with a few mouse clicks. 

"Our people, merely for want of intelligence which they may rely on, are becoming lethargic and insensible of the state they are in."

 --Thomas Jefferson

George Simpson works with a variety of new media companies on marketing, promotion and public relations. Read full bio.