I’d like to pose a question: Where do you get your information regarding our government and public servants? From what I’ve gathered, liberals tune into CNN, conservatives to the Fox News Channel. The apathetic are chided into accepting pamphlets from the LaRouche PAC each time they hopelessly attempt to convince you that Dick Cheney gets a secret paycheck from Satan himself every Friday. The young and the restless await the “Big Idea” from Donny Deutsche, and of course the truly brainless look to Hollywood for miscellaneous wisdom. Such political demagoguery does more harm than good each time it fuels an audacious liberal protester or a temperamental young Republican.

While I concede that conducting thorough research of the day-to-day operations in the government is time-consuming for the average person, I think it is important that we at least hold our tongues and get acquainted with the facts before lashing into one another. Listening to talk radio on the way home from work or catching some commentary on Fox News or CNN is fine, but these resources are biased no matter how many times they claim they are not. The number of sound bites thrown around the airwaves on talk shows probably outnumbers the total amount of baseball pitches Curt Schilling has ever thrown.

The good news is that there is a way to become informed without fearing you are just being lured into an ideological point of view. The main resources I want to point out are C-SPAN and government websites — specifically the website for the House of Representatives (house.gov) and the U.S. Senate (senate.gov). Now, before you call me a loser for having even brought up C-SPAN, I want to tell you that it does not necessarily entail being glued to the television, endlessly scrutinizing every motion the government undergoes while in session. Instead of the “sound-bite” situation, you are able to listen to an entire speech and hear what the conversation on the floor of the Senate was about before rushing to judgment. Instead of reading headlines on CNN.com that state “Bush blasts Kennedy” and walking away with a feeling of “Oh boy, things got rough in Washington,” you can look at the information surrounding this article. Half of the time the adjectives “blasts,” “shuns,” “rocks,” etc. are used, they are only there to catch your eye — most of the time the incident is minimal!

Citizens should be interested in knowing who their elected representatives are and what they stand for. C-SPAN.org gives us the opportunity to view their floor speeches and press conferences — and these are conveniently archived for future viewing. Instead of believing people like Rush Limbaugh or Lynn Samuels on the radio each time they label your congressman as left- or right-wing, wouldn’t you rather go to house.gov or senate.gov and look at their voting records yourself and be able to call them on it? Half of the time these people are lying to you because they know that only a fraction of the population bothers to keep up to date.

It is comforting to know that all the information we would ever need is right at our fingertips and comes without commercials or pop-up ads; in reality this is less time- consuming than one might think. Such resources sidestep the incredible waste of time people like Bill O’Reilly and Chris Matthews wreak upon the airwaves as they senselessly argue, cut off their guests, bang on their desks or righteously twiddle a pen proclaiming “The spin stops here.” You see, in reality the spin only stops when citizens bother to check out the voting records of their elected representatives with their own eyes. Relaying sound bites from Hannity ‘ Colmes to an acquaintance at a dinner party is not the mark of an educated mind. On the other hand, the one who can decipher the platforms of their representatives by looking at how they vote is the true champion of “political awareness.”

I encourage my colleagues in the Boston University community to get ahead of the game by examining their representatives in Congress: check out their official web pages, their voting records, their floor statements and their campaign financial statements that by law must be made available to the public. Then we’ll really know whose yard sign and bumper sticker we’ll want next to our mailboxes and on our vehicles. While political commentary is entertaining, looking at records that do not come with an agenda puts us, the people, in control.

Alexander Fondrier, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, can be reached at [email protected].