Bloviation Nation

Watching the news or reading the newspapers or surfing the Internet these days is like entering a mineshaft. It should come with a warning: " Welcome to the Misinformation Age. Enter at your own risk."

Remember those days when you could actually believe what you heard or read in the media? Me neither. You see, over the years, the media has undergone a sea-change that is not necessarily rich but most definitely strange. And with the rise of the World Wide Web, 24-hour news channels and hundreds of cable stations all vying for dwindling viewer attention and ratings dollars by ratcheting up the entertainment factor, the line between so-called legitimate and illegitimate information sources has become so blurred that it's all but impossible to tell what's real and what isn't anymore. The fact is that today's media is all too often guilty of reporting the story first and asking questions later, much to our collective detriment.

So when, exactly, did it become open season on the truth? I have my theories. Time for a brief ride in the way-back machine.


MEDIA'S RISE INTO THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX

To some extent, people have long been accustomed to hearing "tall tales" from our political leaders and government officials. Heretofore it has been the American media that has assumed the role of "fact-finder", ensuring that such stories were properly vetted. Especially after the fallout from the Watergate scandal, a whole industry of government and corporate watchdog shows like "60 Minutes" and "20/20" sprang up for just that purpose. While the public viewed the media with a combination of suspicion and grudging respect, relatively few questioned the integrity of a Walter Cronkite or a Roger Mudd.

At the same time, the "fringe" media and scandal sheets were safely segregated and relegated to the supermarket checkout stands, good for a few chucks if you were willing to risk the humiliation of being caught reading them. On some level or other, we all knew never to cross the streams between the legitimate sources of information and the "twilight" world of the tabloids.

But at some point, we did cross the streams. While it's hard to pinpoint the exact moment, I think the consensus is that this "shark jump" happened in the 1990s with the OJ Simpson murder case. After all, that case is generally acknowledged as the first time that the “mainstream” media made widespread use of information taken from a tabloid in reporting a major news story. Think about that: We got our "serious" OJ news from the very same source claiming "Idaho Mom Gives Birth to Tater Tot" and extolling the virtues of an all-Kaopectate diet. It had to be a sign of the coming Apocalypse! What it actually was, however, was a seminal moment in journalism from which there was to be no turning back.

Instead, the trend really took off with the rise of the Internet (with a big shout out to Big Al Gore). With no real barriers to entry, the Internet became a clearinghouse for both real and imagined information. Anyone with a keyboard and an opinion, however uninformed, was (and is) free to post at will with precious little in the way of filters. As a result, when you go online, it's like entering the lair of a lifetime hoarder. Only instead of being filled with spoiled food and useless bits of paper mixed in with "the good stuff", on the Internet you find authentic information co-existing side-by-side with the untested, the unseemly, and the untrue (sometimes right on the same Web page). Put another way, if it's true to say that the most effective lie is sandwiched between two truths, then the Internet is a Subway sub shop and Wikipedia its deluxe club.


FOOL ME ONCE...DOH!

I remember being bamboozled by a story just last year involving a man, a lung, and a pine tree. In a nutshell, a guy in Russia had supposedly inhaled a spore and sprouted a pine tree in his lungs. I wasn't inclined to believe it at first, but there were pictures and everything! I could almost see the pine cones in the X-ray that accompanied the story. It was weird, I'll grant you, but if you could grow a watermelon in your digestive tract by swallowing a watermelon seed, who was I to question this story? Besides, I was tag-teamed on this one, with the heady combination of the Internet and the heretofore trustworthy local news station both carrying the story and conspiring to rope me in. No surprise it turned out to be a hoax. It just would've been nice to know that before I passed the story on to several people, thereby forever sealing my fate as the butt of future jokes.

And just as this blurring of fact and fiction has happened with the Internet, it's happened with other media as well. We are bombarded daily with its progeny: Photoshopped magazines; "mockumentaries" like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield"; fictional history like The DaVinci Code; “scripted reality” shows too numerous to count; and, most significantly, 24-hour news channels that are really just entertainment shows with political agendas, culpable partners in the relaying of half truths and innuendo. Ironically, if programs like "60 Minutes" arose to weed out the truth from the stories coming from the government and corporate America, then websites like snopes.com arose on the Internet to examine the stories perpetuated by the media itself.


TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES?

While some of these stories are funny, the consequences of not being able to believe what we see, hear and read are not. And those consequences can run the gamut, from being ill-informed; to loss of money and reputation; to loss of the public trust.

And all of these consequences are already at play. Just last year there was a prank video making the rounds on YouTube showing a Domino's employee supposedly sneezing a piece of cheese out his nose and onto a Domino's sandwich he was making. When the video went viral (along with the sandwich, no doubt), Domino's had no choice but to spend a lot of time and money trying to offset the negative publicity. Nevertheless, their reputation was damaged, because there were quite a few people who saw that video and believed it.

Perhaps harder to quantify is the number of people who saw the video, knew it was a hoax, and still didn't believe Domino's. Check out any public online forum and you're likely to see this type of cynicism on parade. It's almost become like some skewed badge of honor to disbelieve what we see and hear, because the alternative is to be viewed as foolish and naive. However, erring on the side of cynicism and disbelief is no more intelligent and informed than is blind faith. There's a price to be paid for a lack of belief as well.

Which leads us to what I would consider the most subtle, insidious consequence of this constant exposure to misinformation: Namely, forming our political and social viewpoints based on uninformed half-truths. Economic policy. Global warming. Stem-cell research. Terrorist threats. The latest pandemic. All important and complex issues that have been distilled and filtered into 2-minute sound bites by a wide array of media, each with its own spin.

Now, that's not to say I'm looking to be bombarded with facts and figures. After all, there's a reason why there's a long history of people and government and corporate entities burying controversial or unpopular information in an avalanche of typesetting (the current health care reform bill and the so-called "bail-out" bill, neither of which was apparently read by anyone in Congress, spring to mind). But what's missing here is the reliable filter that at one time might have been the media, with "reliable" being the operative term.

Perhaps it is obvious that commentary from the Bill O'Reillys and Keith Olbermanns of the world should be viewed with a jaundiced eye, given their demonstrated personal agendas that color that commentary, but what about the others in that broad spectrum of news and information? When you get right down to it, how do we really know that the information on which we base our beliefs and convictions is true? How do we know?


TAKING RESPONSIBILITY: THE BUCK STOPS HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE

Here's where I believe that we can all be better consumers of information: By pulling our critical thinking skills out of mothballs and questioning everything that relates to our health, our environment, our economy, and our beliefs. Is the information itself based on actual investigation or merely a press release by an interested party advancing its own agenda? By the same token, when we hear the results of some new scientific study, how much do we know about the source of that study, its source of funding, and the potential bias of the reporter?

We can and should seek out alternative viewpoints in an effort to get a more balanced view. It may make us feel better to have our opinions validated when we watch the partisan bloviating that goes on in the public discourse (or in Congress for that matter), but gone are the days when you could expect a fair and balanced reporting of facts and events (if those days ever really existed). When we hear only what we want to hear, you can be sure we're not hearing the whole truth. We need to challenge ourselves.

And ultimately, we need to “Trust...but verify”. Notice I said “trust”. For I do believe that informed trust is vital. After all, if we don't know what to believe (even if it's just some dumb story about a Russian guy who inhaled a Christmas tree), we run the risk of believing nothing. And call me naive and foolish, but I'm still not ready to go there.


IN CONCLUSION: ELIMINATING THE IMPOSSIBLE

Chances are, we've all heard some variation of that old adage about believing only half of what you see and none of what you hear. With pitch-perfect irony, I'm here to report that various sources on the Internet actually attribute that quote to everyone from Ben Franklin to Lou Reed to the Bible. I think even Jay-Z was mentioned somewhere. So much for living in the Information Age.

Perhaps sager advice for today's world would be to get your news and information from MSNBC and FOX, and then split the difference. After these two polar opposites have canceled out each other's self-serving agendas, you just might get the truth somewhere in between. To quote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and this source I am sure of, since the source is Conan Doyle himself): "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains--however improbable--must be the truth."

Welcome to the Misinformation Age. Enter at your own risk.