The 'New Media' is Still Learning How to Crawl

A friend tagged me in a post exposing the bussing of alleged Anti-Trump protesters in Austin, TX, as being ‘fake news’ started by a man and his Instagram.

Austin man, Eric Trucker, debunked his own claim after he tweeted buses were used to transport Anti-Trump protesters.

So now, naturally, we must forget about Wikileaks and the DNC; forget about John Podesta and the agent provocateur practices exposed by Project Veritas. Forget about the paper trails between multinational corporations and protest movements—starting with OWS.  All of that is gone now, because a Mr. So-and-So got a lot of people to believe buses, in Austin, TX, were for Trump protesters without examining facts or evidence, and quickly jumped to a conclusion... Hmmm, where have we seen that kind of behavior before?

I should start by saying that anyone who takes Instagram photos as the be-all end-all is doing more to hurt our collective hopes of ending this culture war than they can ever expect to help.  There is a lot of bad information out there, but the cure is not censorship. The cure, once again, is the individual taking responsibility for what they're accepting as truth, and for what they pass on to someone else—no matter which stance is taken on any issue.

Of course there are going to be mistakes in reporting and sharing information as we continue to reject the same media that turned us into animals in the first place. We're learning how to crawl, walk, and run all over again as we source material from peers and independent journalists/commentators.  All this means is that we need the individual to take responsibility in researching, confirming, and denying claims, while trying their best to detach themselves from cognitive biases, or trying to avoid painting both opponents and allies with a broad strokes.  

Don't have enough time for that? Well then the mama birds of our Government-Media complex are happy to do the digesting for you.

Judging by the fact that the mainstream media has lower approval ratings than Congress itself, we all seem to agree that the “media is bullshit”...unless, of course, the narrative speaks to a specific group’s personal interest. In that case, people gleefully follow the trail of bread crumbs back into the spiteful embrace of the same television they vehemently distrusted the day before.  It's like watching an abusive, on-and-off, polyamorous relationship devour our friends and family.

Sadly, that doesn't seem to matter to many because we're not in the business of Truth, Justice, and the American Way anymore. We're in the business of winning Facebook arguments and slinging passive-aggressive hashtags around.  We're in the business of virtue signalling on behalf of socio-political elitists who have no intent on making the world a better place, because if the world were a better place we wouldn't have any use for them.  We're in the business of allowing the most intimate details of our lives to become politicized so that there is little to no way to relate to someone who lives, or thinks, or votes differently than the person next to them.

What the shift in media coverage has shown us once again is that we are rife with biases and lacking in principle.  On tonight's 11/21/16 broadcast, we will be spending a little more time on the difference between Bias and Principles.