(04-14-2019, 07:01 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote: Because today's media is unreliable. It's exaggerating or giving a false narrative a lot of the time. When you doubt the mainstream media you look elsewhere. I see the media as just a fear mongering industry designed to make money off of people's irrationality.
Media is a plural or medium as a method of communication or entertainment, or source of such. Sorry, I am on the spectrum, and flawed grammar grates on me.
....
I see American entertainment as much of the problem, whether it started with minstrel shows or with P T Barnum's circus. Entertainment has widened in its scope and broken more taboos over time, with such consequences as the infamous "Burly-queue"), pornography (getting its introduction into the mainstream with Hugh Hefner offering pornography without guilt, and others since going deeper into the sleazy and salacious), radio shock-jocks, fecal tabloids, and trashy "reality television". Even sports can degenerate to the point of Mike Tyson biting the ear of Evander Holyfield.
OK, reality television, if done with an educational purpose, can be legitimately interesting. PBS once had a program that saw how modern people could live on the rough edge of the frontier, typically at the line between marginal farming and ranching with none of the modern conveniences. Adults addressed what they most missed (like spring mattresses) and children opined that they really stretched their imagination due to the sensory deprivation.
We all know what Survivor is about: using a warm climate to induce as many people to show as much "T&A" as possible. A hint: there is no "Survivor: Quebec", no "Survivor: Edmonton", "Survivor: Fairbanks", "Survivor: Sapporo", "Survivor: Novosibirsk", "Survivor: Helsinki", or "Survivor: Innsbruck". Such places are simply too cold. In my opinion, those chilly cities have far more to offer than some boring spot in the tropics.
Yes, entertainment is a valid part of life. Comedy is often far better analysis of the news than is the deadly-serious speculation that appears on talk shows on FoX News Channel. You might as well enjoy excellent drama, comedy, cinema, symphony, ballet, and opera on television if it is unavailable elsewhere. There's nothing wrong with putting a little showmanship into education.
Now for the news: some news sources are far more reliable than others. The good ones have journalistic standards. Unless they have definitive sources (official record or sports play-by-play), they expect journalists to get two independent sources for the same key information in a news report. Interpretations are to be valid, and not draw unsuitable inferences. There are opposite sides of most controversial issues. A great journalistic entity -- one that has credibility -- is extremely fussy about correcting even the most trivial errors, including typos. If someone feeds credible lies to a reporter and gets his lies published, only for the lies to be exposed for what they are, then the newspaper exposes the liar, as the Washington Post did with Jeb Scott Magruder. Good journalists do not plagiarize or fabricate stories, lest the journalist be fired and blackballed from the industry. One might go from winning a Pulitzer Prize (that is rescinded) to washing dishes at a diner far away from a big city.
Over time one can check unusual stories for internal consistency (thus Jews cannot be both destructive bolsheviks and rapacious plutocrats as basically the same thing). If it makes no sense, one needs stronger proof than a simple report. Extremists are obviously suspect, as with Commies, fascists, and religious fanatics. You would not trust the Korean Central News Agency that disseminates the official view of the world from the North Korean government, Inspire Magazine (a publication of ISIS that shows such 'glories' as beheading), or Stormfront (White Pride Worldwide). I question whether you would trust Answers in Genesis (a young-earth-creationist journal) for objective science. Anti-vaccination nonsense? Medical secrets (natural cures!) that Big Pharma doesn't want you to find out about? Ancient wisdom that can give valuable knowledge to the elect (by the way -- Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and Lao-tse ar not secret knowledge) an edge in life?
In politics, one-side of the story is rarely the whole of the story. We could have incredible growth in the American economy if employers did not have to pay employees adequately, or so goes the story.
There are tricks for detecting liars (as J Edgar Hoover put it, every criminal that he ever met was a liar, and the FBI technique of getting an offender to tell a lie that evidence or other testimony discredits. The crook says that he was never at 225 Maple street, a private residence where there was a rape, but his finger prints are on the Venetian blinds when he peered through them and felt far safer after he verified that the siren was that of a fire alarm. He claims to have never been there, but his unique finger prints are on the Venetian blinds. As a juror I would find that damning evidence. Basic reality does not change radically unless something extraordinary happens. (Pompeii was a vibrant, thriving small city on 23 August AD 79, but it was no more on 27 August AD 79).
Liars tell falsehoods about the past when the past becomes inconvenient. Someone who proclaims how much he loved Wikileaks in 2016 who now denies such exposes a lack of truthfulness. Trump would be well served if we Americans put his loud praise of Wikileaks into an Orwellian "memory hole".
There is such a thing as objective truth, and there is no 'higher' truth beyond it. No authority can make truth out of falsehood.
I wonder what the percentage of Americans who have read Nineteen Eighty-Four will vote for Donald Trump. Obviously, getting its message requires above-average cognitive skills. People who had read it in the early 'Fifties would have largely voted for Eisenhower. Donald Trump is much less li9ke Donald Trump than is some more recent President.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.