If one thinks about it, it is pretty hard to tell what is
really happening in the nation, or even in the world.
At the topmost level most of the news media that reports on
what is happening in newspapers, on the TV, on talk radio, or in the social media
is highly biased toward either the liberal or the conservative side. They are
biased not only in how they report and how they “spin” the news, but even more
so in what they choose to emphasize and what they choose to ignore.
Below that the political “newsmakers” who provide the media
with their sources are of course equally biased toward one side or the other,
depending on their party affiliation. And of course a good deal of underground
maneuvering and plotting goes on private among these politicians and their staffs
and advisors and publicists and major donors in the brutal game of political
power. So that what gets fed (or leaked) to the media is itself already
suspect.
Then there is the layer of academics, think tanks, and government
agencies who provide ammunition to the politicians for their maneuvering. These
also distort or “spin” the facts not only to satisfy their own political and/or
ideological views, but even more to advance their own institutional powers and
budgets. So that what gets fed (or leaked) to the political newmakers in the
first place is also already suspect.
And below that is the shadowy world of intelligence
agencies, insider trading, covert arms dealers, criminal enterprises, terrorist
cells, and corporate maneuvering, which work hard to cover or distort or mask their
real activities, often by disseminating disinformation which gets accepted readily
by the credulous, including even sometimes the professional intelligence
agencies.
All of which makes me think of what a good magician does
when he or she distracts the audience with one hand while the real action is
happening in the other hand. I have the
same sense about today’s news – how much is real and how much has been
manufactured to support some shadowy purpose, or to distract us from what is really
happening? Certainly enough has been
revealed over the past few decades to support this suspicion, from the torrent
of partisan (and often incorrect) leaks during and since the last election to
the supposedly-scientific studies the tobacco industry sponsored in the 1960s
and 1970s to prove their product was safe.
We humans are gullible. It would be wise to remember that
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