Several times Scott Adams has stated he doesn’t think enough information is made available about important issues to form an opinion one way or another. I feel like that sometimes, I agree news media usually doesn’t give you good context or even worse just follows “accepted lines”.
For example “the war in Iraq was about WMD.” Oops. “OK, now the war in Iraq was about liberating the people of Iraq from Saddam and his oppressive regime”. Yeah, that’s it. No, actually, it is good versus evil. And nothing less.
“Oh Chris now you are just swallowing Liberal Propoganda, we are doing the right thing bringing Peace, Democracy, and Good Stuff to the Middle East”
“Don’t listen to them! It’s a right-wing conspiracy!”
“No it’s not, it is a new post-9/11 world where we must fight the never-ending war on terror”
“Rubbish, it’s about stealing Oil and it always has been”
What to believe? Well as you can see from the links above the majority of my information sources do not lead me to believe the official word on this stuff but then I am cynical of what is said by any politician or partial partisan punditry.
Just lately people have been knocking Digg and even Wikipedia, saying they are regularly gamed by liberals. I think more likely it is more that smart young people tend to lean toward the left, particularly those who are university educated. The kind of people who will contribute most to Digg, Slashdot, etc. I am only talking from what I see, perhaps I am wrong. The problem is, I get most of my news from Digg and BBC News. If they are no more impartial than Fox news where do I get balanced info?
For a while I used to hang out on a political debate email list. I grew tired after a while, nobody would listen, just repeated party lines and used biased links to support viewpoints. Both sides were as reactionary and knee-jerk as the other; “Bush is stupid, evil, or both and his party are war mongers”, “Democrats are in bed with Osama and want to kill babies, kick out Christianity and bring back communism”.
There is probably not a solution to this, people filter out information that does not match their world view so an impartial news source is probably not going to ever be truly popular. Black and white sells, not shades of grey.
If there is an impartial and intelligent source of news I would love to hear about it.
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There is no such thing as a single impartial source of news. Our only hope is triangulation. Listening to as many voices as possible, and assembling it ourselves…
I guess so!
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