Skeptical Squirrel

The current debt debacle illustrates a weak point with representative government; to be fairly represented we need an informed populace, and we do not have that. Citizens are assaulted on all sides by biased sound bites, misleading and sometimes downright fraudulent poll results and statistics and “news” stories presenting slanted opinion disguised as factual reporting. It is nearly impossible today to find a reliably unbiased source for information on the nation’s economic situation or honest predictions about what the future holds for us economically. The country is becoming ever more divided along partisan lines with each side being fed partly accurate information that only supports the goals of each party. It has become difficult if not impossible to make an informed decision in the face of such a paucity of intellectually honest information. We have entered the “Information Age” and yet the information we are getting is nearly useless.

I’m old enough to remember when television news programs were essentially unbiased, when their goal was to report national and international events as they occurred without attempting to editorialize or misrepresent opinion as fact. From the Huntley-Brinkley Report to Walter Cronkite, we came to expect fair and accurate reporting, in-depth journalism and an honest account of what our elected representatives were up to in Washington D.C.

These days we have television news programs that are little more than soap boxes from which each party spreads its propaganda. Little to no effort is made to portray this assault of demagoguery as real news. Yet so few media outlets still exist that engage in true journalism we are in danger of forgetting what it’s like to be presented with the facts of a story and allowed to arrive at our own conclusions.

So where can we turn to find factual and non-political information about the debt crises, global warming, immigration and the host of other issues we face as a nation? I’m not really sure anymore.

It would be a mistake to think that we can trust sources on the Internet. While many “citizen journalists” are reliable sources of first-hand information, trying to uncover their bias or their agenda can be difficult. Too many of them derive their information from the same sources used by Fox and MSNBC. Too often it’s the same propaganda dressed up in fancy web 2.0 garb and animated gif’s.

There are still real journalists performing real journalism around the world, but their reporting is subjected to the filters of an editorial staff beholden to one party or another well before it’s published or broadcast on the evening news. We seldom have access to their undiluted stories.

Our ability to be an informed citizenry is being undermined by those for whom informed citizens present a threat to their power and control. It’s often not that we don’t care to be informed, rather that in most cases we are being prevented from receiving honest and unbiased facts. We are denied access.

And because we are uninformed, we cannot exercise our proper role as “the People”, as in “We, the People…”. We have abdicated responsibility for determining the direction our country is headed and how best to get there to politicians who tell us the problems are too complex for us to understand. They use the media to assure us that they are acting in our best interest while at the same time doing whatever it takes to preserve their base of influence and earn the money that lines their pockets from special-interest groups and lobbyists. Our government is out of control, it is out of our control, and we are being prevented from learning what we need to do to correct our course and fix our problems.