News outlets, documentaries and articles with ‘alternative facts’ are the flavour of the day. Mainstream media is portrayed as an evil agent of the global elite. That’s the popular narrative at the moment. It is misguided.
We assume every second half-baked story that gets a lot of shares, likes and comments on social media is true. Just about any opinion can be drummed up into fact. Other people’s opinions sway our perceptions of truth. If others like it and share it, it must be true. Of course, that is misguide too.
Age of empowerment
Average people around the world are empowered to get information like never before. People are sick of establishment norms, of hearing the same news on all the main traditional outlets. They exercise their right and their new found abilities to search directly on the Internet for any and all topics and get the news themselves from different sources. It’s very empowering.
But with power comes responsibility. With such heaps of contending information comes the need for discernment. The problem is the growth in news availability outstripped our ability to discern. We’ve become unconscious gobblers of information – and the stuff that hits us most, sticks best.
The more ‘alternative facts’ we get, the more we doubt the mainstream information. We don’t have the time, energy or expertise to judge properly what is fact and what’s not.
Everyone seems to be distrusting mainstream consensus in the age of conspiracy theories. So in the absence of our own ability to judge properly, we are swept along with the crowd.
All mainstream media coverage is suspect… just by virtue of it being reported by the mainstream. Our favourite news anchors are suddenly secret agents of the global elite. We rubbish everything in the mainstream – we throw the baby out with the bath water.
A classic example
Mainstream media has given a great deal of coverage to global warming. There have always been dissenting voices that say the whole global warming movement is a conspiracy aimed at fear-mongering, or a lie of scientists to secure their funding, or some other orchestrated plot by highly coordinated and secret scientific alliances.
Bit by bit over the last ten years the dissenters have seemed more and more peripheral. They’ve seemed less relevant recently.
Then… bang. A new American president with a penchant for Twitter. And frighteningly quickly there’s a rise in social media distrust of global warming. Ten years on and we’re back to doubts that were seemingly all but totally dispelled. Almost overnight global warming’s place in mainstream media has become its nemesis.
Many people that went along happily believing global warming was a fact because the main stream media told them so, are now doubting it because they’re trusting ‘alternative facts’ cloaked in social media shares. The global trend away from mainstream to alternative sways them.
Is mainstream all bad?
Not everything in the mainstream is a conspiracy of the establishment aimed to keep you down. In fact, very little is.
Global warming certainly is not a conspiracy. It is real. The reason you can believe it is independent of which news outlet or chat show is reporting it. Thousands of cross-referenced, rigorously validated scientific studies, tested and proved by credible peers say it’s real.
The scientific method and the global scientific community cannot conspire. By nature, scientific fact must stand independent testing. Thousands of scientists usually test and develop theories in their own laboratories or experiments. Thousands of technical papers are delivered at hundreds of conferences every year around the world. It is impossible for all this to be conspired.
Identifying conspiracy
Conspiracies revolve around the ideas of a few people. They are usually the opinions of a small minority in a particular field. They are not empirically proven, but rely on half-tests and illogical conclusions. If you research the opinion, you’ll find the same few names coming up. You’ll see the same few faces on YouTube.
More importantly, conspiracies are usually orchestrated – there’s usually an ulterior motive, often profit, behind them. So, for example, do big oil and mining groups pay global warming dissenters?
This is quite possible. Similar has happened before. Decades ago establishment told the dumbed-down population that cigarette smoking was harmless. The American tobacco industry rewarded misleading opinions to guard against a mass exodus from cigar lounges. Today, we can’t believe how our parents and grandparents believed this lie.
Are we better of today?
But, if ‘alternative facts’ were carefully orchestrated again now at this moment in history when mainstream media is seen as the evil agent of the elite, would people again doubt the facts about cigarettes. Cravers might… if you were looking for an excuse to go back to your addiction it would be easy to allow yourself to believe popular doubts and pick up a cigarette again.
It is the same with climate change. It’s easier to carry on unconsciously with a wasteful lifestyle than to worry about global warming and have to make changes.
The solution
The key to getting the real facts is independent research and authentic experience. Mainstream is usually a good starting point… contrary to recent popular opinion.
We should never buy into opinions blindly whatever their source. Instead we must invest the time and effort to interrogate what we’re being told. We should resist the temptation for quick or popular answers.
Seek numerous cross-referenced and well corroborated sources of evidence. Don’t hook onto a fringe opinion that appears all over the place with the same few people repeating it. By all means consider the fringe opinions. But don’t latch onto them just because they’re anti-establishment, non-traditional or counter to mainstream.
Don’t take the easy road in your desire for the truth to set you free. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. It is lazy and detrimental to your self-development to throw out what establishment, mainstream and tradition tells you just because it’s fashionable. Don’t decide on fact based on a million ‘likes’.
Rather invest in the road less travelled. The road where you don’t rush to believe you know the answers. This is the road where you hover between certainties and live with doubt. You carefully research and discern the likely truth with your own mind and your own being.
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