We have witnessed many changes in news reporting and media in the last 25 years.
The 2016 US presidential election was a special occasion because it seemed the media went all out to convince US citizens that Hillary should be the next president.
Now it seems that media propaganda has been turned up a notch in an effort to shape the public’s opinion. Having read George Orwell’s novel 1984, the environment feels all to familiar… quite Orwellian.
If you check, many times news stories originate from a single source without confirmation and they get repeated across the news media as though accurate.
Let’s say you turn off TV and you’re not watching CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, or FOX. You stop taking traditional print media like Washington Post, NY Times, USA Today, or LA Times who get quoted in other parts of the country.
Where do you get your original source material for the news?
The main aggregators are YouTube, Google News, and Bing News. You get both traditional media and alternative views. In the mix there is a clutter of folks making false or misleading claims to suck you into watching their video.
What should we believe about a story?
I would recommend we confirm that multiple independent sources are reporting the same or similar things. Be skeptical. Don’t think that a story is true because the mainstream media repeats the same narrative on multiple channels. Be careful when you hear exactly the same words. Track down the sources and see if there is more than one.
You should remember that a story can be a narrow point of view. If you can recognize that it does not cover all the issues and possible responses then you know its narrow.
How can we get nearer to the full picture?
In any story there are many points of view. With each new point of view you can see something different that was not there before. As the number of perspectives increase you begin to see a global view perhaps with patterns and recognizable connections. You get a fuller understanding of what’s going on.
Whats the bottom line?
For one lets not go getting hysterical every time the news media tries to whip you into a fervour.