THE MEDIA
Can you rely on what you read in the newspapers or hear from TV newscasts? I think, in most cases, when it comes from national news sources we get opinions and half truths presented as factual news. And to me, half truths are the worst because there is enough truth presented to make it appear that the whole story is being told and therefore the reader’s conclusions are not based on everything he or she should have to consider. As someone said long ago, I think it was Mark Twain but I may be wrong about who said it, anyone who does not read the newspaper is uninformed; anyone who does read newspapers is misinformed. How true that is today.
This is not a new problem. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter dated June 14, 1807, to John Norvell wrote the following:
“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should only answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly (completely) deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by the abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege (knowledge) with lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, by reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”
I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would think of today’s national press, especially “The New York Times” and “Washington Post” or better yet, the spinmiesters at ABC, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC. In my opinion, all of these are avowed Marxist supporters and are totally biased in any so-called news story they produce. There are reporting organizations that prepare and report how biased these organizations really are and how much spin they put on their fiction.
Don