Day 18: I Saw it on TV - It MUST Be True!

I can't tell you how much I love the media these days, and even more so, the people who blindly believe whatever they see on the news. I love how the media has so much power and influence - so that when they f*#! up the facts (which happens the majority of the time), you have this huge mess of inaccurate information and misinformed followers - who also happen to be very vocal so they keep the inaccuracies spreading like wildfire.

This happens so often and I've been irritated by it for so long, it's time to finally talk about how annoyed I am.

As we all should be. Seriously - stop and think. Information is always incredibly at your fingertips. We've become so accustomed to this ease of communication and information transfer that we've gotten lazy in doing our due diligence to find out if anything is even supported by real, valid sources! It blows my mind. 

I guess that's why I've fallen so madly in love with the Daily Show (okay...and Jon Stewart). But honestly, if you haven't seen the Daily Show please give it a try. I know it's meant to be a comedy and they're very good with that aspect. But more importantly, they're even better at stripping away all the feelings of "this is normal" when we view media and news reports so that the naked and utterly disgusting truth is revealed, showing how absolutely insane our way of reporting is. There are so many dramatizations, over-exaggerations, hypocrisies, line-crossing attacks, and blatant lies that are presented in a fashion that we've come to regard as just the way things are. What makes the Daily Show so amusing is that all they have to do is take the real news, remove the context of "a credible and trusted news source" that's delivering it, show it next to a clip of the same reporter saying the exact opposite only a few months ago, and voila - you have an eerie comedic irony. 

We really should take a moment to look around at the media and the effects it's having on our lives. For goodness sake people we sure are making it easy for those crazies out there to convince us the end of the world is here. Hopefully it's the end of the world...as we know it. It'd be wonderful to wake up in 2013 and see this ugly trend of media hype melt away so that simple rationality is left over and we can all just calm down and live our lives. 

Power to the (responsible) People.