Hardly a day goes by when folks gripe about media bias of one sort or another. Much of it strikes me as much ado about nothing for what makes for a good doctor, economist, accountant, psychologist, lawyer, physicist or nearly any other profession? Some things one might think important are in fact, irrelevant. For instance, one's grades in graduate, law or medical school are important while one is there, but the instant one obtains one's professional certification, one is as good as everyone else having that certification and better than everyone who does not. The thing is that once one is "official," to stay that way, one must engage in continuing education for as long as one wants to practice in that field. What correlates best with one's being very good at one's profession is being well informed, and the way to do that is to read journals. I don’t know whether that means good professionals read more journals or reading more journals makes a better professional.
The thing is that the very same thing that make for good professionals make for good citizens. It's every bit as important for laymen to be cognizant of "what's what" in current events. This is as true now as it was in the Founder's days. Jefferson had some six thousand books in his library so he could be an informed contributor to discussions that captured his interest. The Renaissance predated Jefferson, yet he was a "Renaissance Man." Moderns blessed with the freedoms of democracy must also be, and the efficient way to do so is to include in one information gathering reading journal articles. There's just too much information packed into any one document to do it any other way.
Of course, few of us aim to match the knowledge and contextual expertise of professionals in a discipline that isn't ours, yet given the complexity of issues that confront us, we each have a duty to understand them well enough at least to make sage decisions about them. To do that one must quickly "get up to speed" without having to read two dozen textbooks, gain thousands of hours of experience, and so on.
It used to be that one could do that by turning on the TV and watching the news, but
back then, news wasn't conceived and delivered as an entertaining and self-affirming product. It was what it was, but whether audiences liked the news content didn't matter. That, of course, is no longer so, yet one must still obtain information that, regardless of what one thinks about it, one has a way to assess its rigor and quality.
In spite of the Internet rapidly gaining a strong foothold as a quick source of information, reading journal articles, print or electronic, remains the most common way of acquiring new information for most of us who give a damn about being well informed and forming soundly defensible points of view. Newspaper reports or novels can be read insouciantly, but reading research reports and scientific articles requires concentration and meticulous approach. Regardless of the topic, journals are the place to go for the highest quality and most reliable information one can obtain. With more than 2.5 million new English-language papers are published each year in more than 28,000 [peer-reviewed] journals, there's at least one journal for every topic one can imagine, and likely some that one cannot.
Unlike Jefferson's time and before when books were expensive, there really is no excuse for not being well informed these days. Being well informed is something one accomplished by reading journals. Using the information one finds there, it makes little difference what news networks say; one'll be in good stead to
know whether it's BS or credible.
What about a journal article makes it so much better than news pieces? The methodology section. Quite simply, whether one likes the conclusion(s) at which a researcher arrived, if the methodological approach that led to them is preponderantly sound, there's no basis for denying them. That's just not something one gets from news reporting. Can one encounter papers that are preponderantly methodologically unsound/incomplete? Of course, one can, but reading the methodology will allow one to tell whether that's so and, in turn, to what degree the findings "hold water" or don't. Frankly, that's a far better place to be in than is that of watching a panel of pundits on the "boob tube" prodigiously proffer and proselytize on the merits of myrial implausible policy ideas.
