Gullibility is derailing progress
This piece could have been titled “lies derail progress,” but truly, lies are only effective at derailing progress when they are believed by enough people…and one need only look at the confusion and anger surrounding the details of proposed health care reform to see that plenty of Americans have fallen for obstructive falsehoods about the substance of the President’s plan. Even a day after President Obama clearly laid out his ideas and debunked the most absurd myths about health care reform, obstructionists were out chanting the same ole lies, insisting, when questioned, that they still believed what they were saying.
The same gullibility is obstructing progress on the sustainability front as well. Expensive advertising campaigns by big industry and news organizations that report rumors as fact and would rather pander to their audience than practice journalism effectively mislead millions of Americans on issues ranging from clean coal, to forest health to global warming. I blame mainstream news broadcasters and newspapers more than the industries that are trying to protect the status quo. It should be, no it is, a journalist’s job to uncover facts and report them, but the way I see it, several so-called journalists have adopted sensational, shallow and divisive tactics; and their work lacks objectivity and accuracy. I’m not alone in my perception: According to a new survey conducted by The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 63 percent of Americans surveyed believe that news stories are often inaccurate and 74 percent of respondents believe stories are biased, favoring one side of an issue over another. Yet those inaccuracies are clearly shaping public opinion. Inaccuracies reported on the news are being repeated on Facebook, Twitter and in blog after blog–in a distinctly mean-spirited way I might add–warping the collective conscience and undermining genuine attempts to accomplish some truly life and world changing things.
The decline of mainstream journalistic standards and ethics in this country has so elevated collective misperceptions and national discordance that it is proving itself to be a venomous killer of democracy and progress. For this reason, media reform may be the most urgent reform of all. (Further reading: Truthout.org)
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