Thursday, September 23, 2010

Testing the Value of Truth

By Rory O'Connor
September 23, 2010

On Aug. 29, 2008, just prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, presidential candidate John McCain announced he had chosen Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Read on.
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1 comment:

Ethan Allen said...

While Rory O'Connor's anecdotal article presents a cogent picture of one of the many perils of modern cyber "information" sharing, the Editors Note: preceding it seems to better address the greater general penchant for intentional dissembling and propaganda saying in pertinent part:
" Editor’s Note: Though nothing is more important to a democracy than an informed electorate, political operatives of all ideological stripes have sometimes come to believe that their causes are so worthy that it’s okay to play with the facts as a short-cut to achieving a goal.

That was where traditional journalism was supposed to step in, to apply some standards of fact-checking and fairness. However, that safeguard also has broken down, leaving democracy more and more vulnerable to propaganda and deception,...."

I submit that the principle cause for confusion amongst our people, about the veracity of the "information" they are provided with, stems from the conflation of factual reporting and editorial opinion across the entire spectrum of sources available to them; with no exceptions! The primary responsibility for this compromise of both the quality and content of the "information" the public receives lies at the feet of the publishers and their sycophant editors; it is they who are supposed to discern between factual discourse and reporting, and other forms of literature. In a culture such as ours, which has largely been conditioned to prefer titillating and hollow melodramatic sensationalist fiction over factual substantive and well-reasoned discourse, the prevalence of cognitive dissonance that passes for factual understanding is the obvious cultural "blowback" of this professional malfeasance.
It is entirely possible that this very public unwittingly funds more of this "information management" than can be published by all the credible alternatives, through the public funding of entire government agencies, psuedo-academic grants, ideological political interest groups, and various other collusions with private interests; all of which are designed to prevent an intelligent and informed public.

Sat Sep 25, 01:33:00 PM 2010

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