by Mark Dykeman

Created on: August 17, 2007   Last Updated: March 03, 2010

There are days that our minds are so bombarded by facts, images, and ideas that we fear that our heads will explode, just like in the movie "Scanners"! We are all bombarded with tons of useless information every day.  Radio, TV, Internet, newspapers, magazines, E-Mail, you name it: there is no way we can take it all in. Meanwhile, we multi-tasking, dealing with problems of all shapes and sizes.  We have to listen to the demands of my body, not to mention friends, colleagues, and family and it's just impossible to keep up with it all.

We constantly have to make quick judgments and assessments about the facts we see and many of them in the "blink" of an eye, as author Malcolm Gladwell might suggest. There's no time to properly assess everything. This can be a huge problem.

Here are some serious concerns about the reliability of information supplied by the mass media:

BIAS, SPINNING, AND SHAPING OPINION

Bias is a term used to describe a preference, whether overt or covert, that influences how we see the world and how we describe it to other people. Bias in the US media is typically described as liberal or conservative and each side claims the other is reporting information according to their preference. On one side you have "fair and balanced" Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Bernard Goldberg (the author of "Bias"), while in the other corner you might have CNN, the now defunct Air America, and certain stereotypical "liberal"media. Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media argues strongly, and somewhat convincingly, that the so-called liberal bias in well-known news sources is exaggerated. Moreover, he indicates that there is more of a conservative, or corporate, bias in the media because, put simply, big business pays the bills.

The truth probably lies somewhere between the two extremes because any special interest, once it has enough resources and power, will use the media to promote their preferred messages for good or evil. Government, in its somewhat unholy partnerships with big business, will also attempt to use the media to broadcast its preferred messages. My own experience in business and politics, although limited, leads me to believe that the phrase "the ends justifies the means" is alive and well and the facts are one of the casualties of the spin wars. Facts, to paraphrase a popular documentary, become an inconvenient truth to be eradicated or ignored in the pursuit of the agenda.

MASS-PRODUCTION, LOW QUALITY

If you do enough exploring and investigation,

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