Last evening I attended a public lecture by Dr. Teodoro León Gross, a professor of communication at the University of Málaga (Spain) and a regular columnist for the Málaga newspaper Diario Sur. Sponsored by the Ateneo de Marbella, a local citizens' organization promoting cultural awareness, the lecture focused on the current state of the mass media in Spain while also addressing broader media trends.

While a summary of León Gross's excellent lecture would require more space than I have here, I do want to call attention to one important observation he made about the relationship of individuals to the media texts we read, watch, and listen to. Although it was hardly an original observation, it is still worth repeating and pondering, particularly in terms of its implications for understanding the news media.

Why, he asked, do we tend to take such little care when deciding which news sources we will consult? Why do we allow ourselves to be so uninformed about the very media outlets that are supposed to inform us? In illustrating this point, he noted that many people have become increasingly conscious of the need to read the label when purchasing food. How much sodium (or fiber, or saturated fat, or calcium) am I putting into my body when I eat a serving of this alfredo sauce? In doing so, we are benefiting from a long struggle to make the contents of food products more transparent, thereby helping us make better decisions about what to eat and what not to eat.

The same goes for other products. No one would think seriously about buying a car, for example, without finding out something about its fuel efficiency, its safety features, etc. This is important information, right?

You can see where this is going. When it comes to news media products, León Gross argued, we rarely tend to look for the kind of information--what we might call the "intellectual nutrition facts"--that would help us decide whether we really want to put these products into our brains.

Why is this? In some ways that's a hard question to answer, but the most obvious answer is that newspapers, TV and radio news broadcasts, and news websites don't come with labels that clearly identify their contents in a way that would help us make more informed choices. Sure, they offer us basic information about topics covered (go here for sports news, go there for Asia news, etc.), but when it comes to the real ingredients that matter and their relative proportions, we are left in the dark. The label is invisible.

What are these ingredients? In many ways, the raw materials of news are sources--the people and institutions that provide information, perspectives, quotations and other building blocks used to construct news stories. The stories, in turn, constitute fundamental building blocks for an entire newspaper or broadcast. Wouldn't it be helpful to have a list of those materials?

During León Gross's lecture, I found myself thinking about what such a list might look like. Even for a supposedly "elite" newspaper like the New York Times, an accurate list would have to indicate that advertising takes up more space than anything else. It would also have to indicate that news about baseball almost always takes up more space than news about the entire continent of Africa. A list of source material would be even more revealing. What percentage of the average newspaper's coverage is based on official sources (government, military, law enforcement, etc.)?

So (if you have been generous enough to read this far), here is my question: What kind of labelling would you like to see on your media products? Post a comment and let me know...