When I was younger, I had a vague interest in politics and would sometimes find myself debating social issues like abortion, criminal justice and capital punishment, *welfare, and our “controlled substances” policies with some of my conservative-leaning peers. At the time, I had a pretty loose grasp of the actual impact of such issues on our society and rarely did any of the key political issues of the day seem to have any real effect on my life – which means they weren’t important enough to warrant more than the ocassional and mostly lighthearted oral controversion. In those days, I wasn’t nearly as interested in the actual facts or truth so much as the emotion that defending my beliefs brought about. At some point, I guess I came to a realization that emotion is a funny thing that can’t always be trusted, especially in an age of consumerism where everyone seems to be trying to sell something and persuasive marketers know precisely how to stir up the emotional response of their target demographic.
Today we’re seeing a frightening influx of corporate crusaders masquerading as concerned citizens, journalists, and “grassroots” organizers/activists. These people have been hand-fed by corporate lobbies and misinformation agents, and are now taking to the streets in an attempt to stop any number of atrocities being committed by the Obama administration and democrats in Congress. The thing is – these “atrocities” aren’t actually being committed at all. There’s a concerted effort on the part of conservative republicans to misinform the public to the point of mass confusion. There are cable “news” programs, blogs, and “news”papers joining this effort, which makes it all the more difficult for honest people to convince the clueless masses that they’re being duped.
It’s amazing to me that, in this “information age” where everything is online and anything you could ever possibly want to know is less than a second away (thanks, Google!), there are people who are still so dependent on cable television and the mainstream media to keep up with current events. Television is a static medium (sometimes, quite literally). With a few exceptions, everything you see on television is heavily scripted and rehearsed. The internet, on the other hand, is constantly changing. You might read a story on a news website one morning and find that, several hours later, the story has been updated with new information. Of course, this happens in television news, too, but updates are dependent on scheduling, time slots, etc. Yes, they do interrupt with “breaking news” sometimes, but they can’t do it every single time there’s a new tidbit of information on a story. On the internet, you can update your web site any time you want – there’s no need to wait until 5pm, 6pm, 11pm, or a commercial break, as there is with television news.
“Watching the news” and “reading the paper” now also mean watching the news online, and reading the “paper” online. Where and how a person gets their “news” can be a great indication of that person’s state of mind and often even their political alignment. The philosophy of conservative “news” publications seems to be, “lie to them and hope they don’t try to verify the information through another source”. This is easier to do on television, particularly when your target demographic appears to be made up primarily from the 50+ , “technologically challenged” (aka: computer illiterate) crowd. Someone who is comfortable with computers and knows their way around the internet will be more likely to cross-reference the information that’s presented to them and discover when they’re being intentionally misled by the media.
The internet is undoubtedly the largest compilation of information the world has ever known, and understanding how to use the internet as a research tool is something that’s drilled into the subconscious of anyone who has ever used it for that purpose, particularly those in the academic community, students, teachers, and the media. When using the internet as a research tool, you have to be diligent in verifying sources. It isn’t enough that an article or study appears in eleventy-billion web pages on a Google search. You also have to consider where they appear most frequently, what those web sites’ motivation for publishing such information is, and if they have an underlying political agenda that may disqualify them as an unbiased and reliable source.
If you really want to be well-informed in today’s politcal/media climate, that means taking the initiative to do a little investigative reporting of your own. If you see something on the news or read something on a news web site that doesn’t sit well, do a little digging. Plug a phrase or some key words into your search engine and see who else is running the “story”, how the facts of the story match up across several different sources, and whether the majority of media outlets where the story is found are unbiased and reliable. It may seem like a daunting task at first, but once you’ve identified a few mostly trustworthy sources, it becomes increasingly easier to spot the bias and determine which outlets are reliable and mostly unbiased and which aren’t.
4 steps toward enlightenment:
1)Go straight to the source: Remember playing “telephone” as a kid? Someone starts a “rumor” that’s whispered amongst a circle of people and by the time it gets back to the person who started it, it’s something completely different? Remember when Al Gore invented the internet, newspapers became obsolete, and the “mainstream media” outlets were trying to find their way back into people’s homes through a complicated series of tubes? Somewhere along the way the MSM must have taken a shortcut through the blogosphere, depriving them of the oxygen required for normal brain function. As a result, some things you hear/read on/in the “news” contain more opinion than fact. Just about every prominent public figure or organization has an established web presence, so it’s often as easy as finding the appropriate URL – especially for any questions relating to the U.S. government. Relating specifically to legislative issues (what’s in a bill, who supports it), everything is posted at the Library of Congress web site.
2) Independent fact-checking web sites: Web sites like Politifact.org and FactCheck.org make a great first-stop for verifying any questionable statements made by prominent political figures or politically-aligned organizations and individuals in the media. Factcheck.org filters out the larger particles of gunk floating on the surface with near-perfect accuracy but doesn’t usually dive into the deeper layers of muck, which is why I consider it a good starting point. Politifact.org’s Truth-O-Meter and Obameter are equally helpful but by no means all-inclusive – but, wait! There’s more…
3)Media watchdogs: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is a national media watch group that has been offering well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. At the other end of the political spectrum is Newsbusters.org, a project of the Media Research Center (MRC), the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias. Keep in mind that these types of “watchdog” organizations are often biased themselves, so anything you read on their websites should also be verified by additional sources, if possible.
4) Google: Pretty self-explanatory. If(when) you hear or read something that just doesn’t sound right, plug some search terms into Google (or whatever search engine you use, I like bing because you can search through news articles or videos and sort them by most recent) – and see what you can find. Anything you read on a blog should be considered opinion rather than fact unless there are reputable news organizations reporting the same information. On the other hand, just because a news organization runs a story and someone blogs about it doesn’t mean that you should consider everything in that blog entry to be factual and visa-versa. The “news” contains so much opinion these days that it actually warrants its own fact-checking (see number 3, above).
* the term “welfare” is used to describe social “safety net” programs in their totality. This term used to be applied to one particular program that distributed cash payments to low-income individuals and families who were struggling financially. That program was retired in the 1990′s and replaced by another program, no longer called “welfare”.
