Theft of the common sense, theft of the evidence of that your senses provide your brain with, theft of you faculties of reasoning, theft in broad daylight. What do we mean? The fact that the media’s bias is absolutely out of their own control. A simple example. The media tell you about the polls concerning the two candidates running for president, and they inform you credibly that the vote for either candidate is shared roughly fifty-fifty. Yet, in the same breath, the same media will show you a street poll in which they will ask, say, ten people about who their favourite candidate is, and all of them will turn out to be in favour of the candidate that a particular media endorse. Weird, isn’t it?
Why are the media people incapable of controlling themselves? Why are they incapable of being consistent? Is it dictated by the intense hatred of the other candidate? Is it dictated by a very low esteem that they hold their readership or their audiences in? Surely, there are a lot of the readers or viewers or listeners who will not notice this glaring bias. Surely there are a lot of the listeners or viewers who will fail to see this discrepancy. Surely, some of the viewers or readers will, but then they share the same intense hate towards one of the candidates and so they just cannot but indulge in this one-sided narrative. For all that, however, there are some media savvies who will be repelled by that kind of unfairness. There are some among the readers, the listeners, the viewers who have a capacity for reasoning, for remembering, for comparing. If they spot recurrent discrepancies, they will become sceptical about the information that they are fed by the media. There will also be some who will challenge the warped presentation of reality and they may pass their scepticism and criticism of the media onto others, thus slowly spreading the seeds of doubt, disbelief, and eventually total rejection of the official sources of information, a process that currently seems to be in full swing across the Western world.
A media outlet exercises an enormous power over the consumers of the information. It is not easy for an average man to catch them lying. It is the media that have access to sources of information and it is the media that have all those technological gadgets with which to put news pieces together in such a way as to create the narrative that is desired by the owners of the media. Yet, from time to time, they will get lost in their own invented narrative, they will eventually expose themselves for what they really are: tools for the manipulation of public opinion. One thing that can easily throw media credibility into doubt is the internal discrepancy or the internal contradiction contained in the messages, or – in plain English – the lie that they give to themselves.
Again: why say that roughly half the country is for, while the other half is against a given candidate and then ‘corroborate’ the stats with a street query in which all or almost all pollees voice their support for one of the candidates only? One wonders what’s the intellectual framework of such journalists or those who have those journalists do their job. Can’t they control themselves? Is it that they lack basic mental faculties or is it that they hold the entirety of the consumers of information in utter contempt? They certainly regard themselves as custodians of the political and moral backbone of the citizens; they certainly assume that the vast majority of the consumers of information do not have the capacity for working out answers, for doing thorough research, for grappling with huge amounts of data. That’s understandable. One is tempted to use it and… abuse it. But why provide the readers, listeners, viewers with evident discrepancies and contradictions?
