Reading the news is an exercise in critical thinking, but is it a better one than reading books? If you want to practice distilling a narrative from various sources, why not read several different books about history or science or philosophy instead?
This is a hard question and in my initial post I wanted to write a paragraph rant about it.
I think there is a case for the similarity between the slow stream of aleatory snippets that characterize the websites like the New York Times and the way we receive information concerning our everyday lives. The way we get information in our lives is certainly granular, contains much noise, and is primarily observation. Novels are not granular with little noise. Philosophy is explanation and we may miss out on the initial gather steps. Although it would be fun to phrase this a testable hypothesis.
I think its a different kind of critical thinking.
