It's Just Exhausting: Fact Checking and Media Bias in Our Times

I'm just tired.

Somebody was asking me what my opinion about some article they'd read was, and instead of answering their question directly I replied with "I'm just tired."

What I'm tired of is that every time I get sent some link to a piece of information or news story and a friend/acquaintance is "going off" about some new piece of news about the state of the world, or Covid, or politics, or something else, it's no longer a matter of simply responding.

What do I mean?

Well, instead of simply replying as if I had a piece of actual knowledge, the beginning of the process starts with "where did you get that information?"

If they can, in fact, source their opinion — which most of the time they can — then the next part of the process starts.

Between a rock and a hard place?

Without even reading anything more than the headline — which is usually filled with scandalous clickbait words designed to outrage people — my process starts with running the source of the article through at least three media bias checking venues, to see where on the political/philosophical spectrum the publication falls.

This allows me to read the actual information with some sense of what the source wants the truth to be as opposed to what the truth actually is.

Which is another aspect of disseminating information in our day and age. The facts don't actually mean much; the most important thing we have to look at is the lens of perception delivering the facts... hereunder that a lot of those who publish things have their own personal agendas and there is stuff they want to be true regardless of whether or not it actually is true, and if they can spin their story in such a way that they present what they want to be true as "the facts" they will definitely do that.

It's sort of like a process of knowing what you want the end result to be (for example, as a scientist), and then setting up an experiment that actually supports your end results rather than an experiment that presents the actual facts.

With these things firmly in mind, I actually read the article and think about what is being said regardless of whether I agree with it or not.

Having read the actual article — and usually discovering that I'm looking at a bunch of sensationalist hogwash that has no way been scientifically researched and basically represents somebody's opinion who has an ax to grind — then I have to decide whether I actually have the time and energy to respond to the person at the other end who originally sent me the link.

Most of the time I don't.

And that's what makes me so damn tired.

I guess I should learn to just be a disrespectful asshole who says "I don't give a frack what your stupid articles are about, don't send me crap from sketchy sources!"

Which leads me to a second thing I'm tired of... which is that everybody seems to just be living inside the fears and paranoia of their imaginations, rather than actually trying to live their lives at street level.

It's a bit like somebody who walks down a river bed and keeps turning over rocks until they finally find one that has a snake under it so they can scream at the world "look there are snakes under these rocks in the river it's a dangerous place to be!"

Well, no those are not actually the facts. The fact is that you spent 14 days turning over rocks to find one snake in an isolated part of the river so you could satisfy your personal need to declare everything in nature "unsafe." Those are the facts.

But of course in our day and age those actual facts don't sell newspapers or get clicks. We want entertaining facts...

And so we end up with this tremendous "panic soup" of words out there that actually don't help further anybody's interest and just wastes a monumental amount of time so we end up not having time to do anything else.

And that just makes me really tired, and makes me want to retire from the human race... permanently!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your weekend!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2023-07-30 00:05 PDT
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