My sister once said to me ‘if you don’t watch the news you are uninformed but if you watch the news you are misinformed’. And to think, all this time I was just trying to be informed when all I was doing was being spoon fed. How many times have you heard someone state why they don’t like a politician or why they are voting for one person over the other. I may be over confident but I can guarantee you that 9 out of 10 times, all of your political views and beliefs were formed based off of something you heard on the news and/or something you heard on the radio. How many times have you done your own research on legislation, proclamations, and presidential executive orders? You haven’t. And that’s why the media is such a beast. It paints pictures. It creates your reality and U.N.E.N.O.
The media and its palter is responsible for a lot of our views, stereotypes and what we deem as important. How sad was it when we discovered that Paula Dean was freely using the ‘N’ word just as easily as she would put an entire stick of butter on a slice of bread. Were you outraged? I mean, how could she? So Paula Dean is now all over twitter and Facebook, consuming a good percentage of our attention, because the media told us it was important. Paula Dean is the least of our troubles. Don’t get caught up in the hype. Yeah, it sucks that someone that most of us admired is using this derogatory language. But I have sad news; IT'S NOT THAT IMPORTANT.
The media dictates what we deem as important. And sometimes it develops what we determine as ‘truth’, and as we watch the most trusted news station we never question their veracity, their sponsors or their agenda.
I remember when I worked at the Kennedy Space Center and I heard the reporter discussing the Constellation program and the Aries rocket. Because I was very familiar with the program (but not a subject matter expert) I was able to determine that some of her statements were incorrect. And this helped me to realize that information traveling is information altered.
Subliminal Messages
I remember watching CNN and they showed several different clips where Glenn Beck mentioned that some people have referred to the president as the devil. It was as if he was trying to convince others that this was what everyone else believed and he wanted to plant that thought into your heads. It was an underhanded attack. And I probably would respect him more if he just said that was how he felt (although I don’t think Glenn Beck really cares, his opinions could all just be controversial in order to keep the checks rolling in).
Media, you sly FOX (News). You almost made me hate myself and my skin complexion. You almost made me hate my body; you almost made me buy that chain. You almost made me think Jay-Z was the most influential man of the year. Almost. But luckily for me, I can tune you out when I need to.
And it’s not just the media. It’s any person or thing relaying information. Even if the information is completely true, the delivery has to be calculated and adjusted for the audience. Done improperly and it can have grave impacts on the listeners. I remember when my teacher taught us about slavery and how the white man enslaved the black man. That is where I learned that we were divided. That’s when I learned that blacks were considered an innately inadequately race, hardly to be distinguished as a part of mankind. Because my teacher didn’t have the sense to explain that the views back then were all wrong, and waited until we got to the years of Martin Luther King Jr to declare that we were all created equal, I grew up believing that whites were entitled, smarter, richer, and all that jazz.
Ask yourself, ‘is this important?’
Watching House of Cards, and seeing how the media will use buzz words to get a story attention and how they distract us with petty controversies. We have to allow ratiocination when taking information in. You have to ask yourself what really matters. You have an issue with your complexion? You despise Paula Dean for using the N-word? We cathect in unimportant trivial matters. You can’t change Paula and this is just exposing a small fragment of who she is behind the fame. No one is perfect. Since we live in a free country, people are free to make racial remarks, and we are free to boycott her products. We are free to forgive (whether or not she was bathetic). No exaggeration need.
