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To be quite honest, I do not really keep up to date with news, any news I see comes from social media accounts that I follow like popular radio stations and some other pop culture accounts.
Because of this, I am also not entirely sure wether my views are considered to be left or right wing, most of the time I don’t have a strong opinion. If I had to pick one, I would say that I
fell more to the left. For this experiment, I actively sought out Canadian right wing news articles and stories, rather than being passive throughout my day and simply hearing things from
people around me. The first thing I noticed in many of the news sources I saw, was that the stories reported news but in my opinion, they never reported the reasons why certain things were
happening. A trend I saw in many of the right wing reports was how misleading they were in favour of the Ontario government currently in power (Conservative, Ford). For example, an article
posted by the Toronto Sun discussed the looming Canadian Postal strike, and how it will disrupt cannabis deliveries, and ultimately lead people back to the illegal cannabis market. The
article claims that the Ontario government took a responsible approach by adopting a retail model, but stops there. The story never mentions the downside of the retail model, that it has yet
to be implemented, while the online store has already been running. This is yet another fail by the Ford government, if there had been retail stores implemented already, there would be less
motivation for consumers to return to illegal markets during the postal strike. It was actually frustrating and angered me to be reading such misleading articles. The biggest impact that
this experiment had was that I think it made me realize that while I may tell myself I have no opinion on things, and I am neither left nor right winged in my views, I have come to the
conclusion that I may be more left winged than I had noticed. Following news sources like Ontario News Now… I don’t even feel comfortable calling it a news source, since it is just one sided
pro-conservative propaganda who’s website doesn’t even have an about us page because it would have to either be filled with lies, or discredit them as a news source. On a positive note,
there were some things about this experiment that had a more positive impact. It it gave me and my dad a lot to talk about… and agree on . In ranting about the ridiculousness of so many
stories I was reading, and the intentional omitting of information, I quickly found that my father and I had the same/similar views and ideas about it. I found myself not wanting to use
social media as much as I ran into more and more sources that are far from my views. All in all, I think I am okay with not following news sources that mainly push conservative agendas. I
like my mindless daily doses of random popular culture and celebrity gossip to brighten my day. As bad and ignorant as it may seem, I like living in my “filter bubble”, and I don’t think
that this makes me uneducated and uniformed, I am just informed about stuff that I care more about. And when it comes to important news that I hadn’t come across through my filter bubble, I
have no doubt that someone in my circle of friends or my family will bring it up to me, asking me “have you heard about _____”. So I am glad that this 48 hour period is now over, and I can
go back to reading about how Justin Bieber was dumb enough to get married without a prenup.