Saturday, April 19, 2008

Are You Being Lied To?

When Carol and I got together for the MisConBlog Meetup, she said to me that she really resents feeling like she is being manipulated. I have to agree with her wholeheartedly on this point. Maybe, it's because I am getting older and crankier, or maybe it's because I have more access to information than ever before. In any event, I am finding that there seems to be a concerted effort to mislead all of us about essential facts.
As I had mentioned earlier, there are those who seem to go out of their way to purposely mislead us. Or they are so misled themselves, but confident that they are right, that they fail to think critically about the information that they are purporting to rely on.
But it's not just my friends on the Left. Even supposedly "professionals" are trying to mislead us.
Apparently, there is an active effort that is being coordinated to control what we think about subjects. And this is not a recent phenomenon as shown here, here here, and I could keep on listing them, but I think that you get the point.
No longer do we have unbiased news reporting, but the sort of "advocacy journalism" that is pure propaganda. What the Left forgets is that if it can be manipulated by their side, it could surely be manipulated by their opponents as well.
Ahh, but I can just hear Mark T.'s keyboards a clacking that news comes from corporations, and corporations are evil. Therefore, it is already slanted in favor of the Right. Yeah, those bastions of Conservatism like CBS and Reuters are in the tank for the Republicans, aren't they.
While I understand that people can have varying opinions about what needs to be emphasized, that should not apply to objective information gathering. How can we discuss a situation, if we cannot even agree what the situation is?
Maybe more of us need to borrow the line from Reagan - "Well, there you go again." to dismiss nonsense from the Left. Just smile, chuckle a little bit and pat them on the head, then send them out to play with their make believe stories, while we grownups discuss serious matters.

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