Wild Assumptions Become Conventional Wisdom (How the Media Creates Reality)

We are all familiar with the 24 hour news cycle. It is an inundation of information most of which we have know way of verifying. Sometimes, when a news story breaks, and it is on a topic that you yourself are familiar with, you might find yourself shouting at the radio or television in a futile attempt to add your two cents, knowing full well that the reporter had just perpetrated an act of all-too-common journalistic malpractice.

It is on all other news outside of our experiences that we rely on news and information programs to fill in our blanks. We expect them to be truthful above and beyond any other expectations. It has, it does seem to me, in that truth department where the media has let us down.

This Thanksgiving, while amongst my Family-in-Laws, I realized that the media bias which has far too often been downplayed by conservative authors and commentators has in fact infected the general population. I was surprised at what these otherwise educated and successful people believed they knew and more disappointingly what they did not know they didn’t know.

There were many conversations throughout the day that were politically charged. I avoided most because to open my mouth amid the total democrat majority would have been for me to reenact Tony Montana going down to the authorities. But what I heard was jaw dropping.

At the table, as the twenty or so of us dined on enough food to feed a hundred, the man of the house, speaking to a retired auto worker said that “…we’re all feeling this economy.”

I on the rare occasion this day spoke up.

“How so?”

He went on with a list that could have been compiled by Keith Olberman on any given day.

He told me how “We’re in a depression.” And so on.

So I plainly went forward telling him how during a depression there are soup lines. You would not see lines for the new ipod or Wii if we were truly in a depression. I told him how every single person at the table had a job and that as far as we were all concerned they were quite secure.

Now before you go on to think that this was some feast at Pemberly with Mr. Darcy; at the table was a retired auto worker and his wife who still works for one of the Big 3 and expressed to me that her job was secure. There was a therapist, a machinist, a legal clerk, a janitor, a contractor, a wedding planner, and an entire list of us blue-collar slugs, all of us admitting that we felt a sense of job security.

And so, while the economy could most definitely be better, why is it that so many of us, who are not in danger of our homes being foreclosed, who get up and are still going to work everyday, who are a bit overweight, are so concerned about the economy? Because a lie repeated enough…

I am not posting here to convince anyone that they will not face a time or two a financial crisis. What I am suggesting is that perception is reality, and it is time to realize that the media bias that creates reality is in control (along with leftists who need a crisis to implement there plans). Most people will fall back on reason. It is that innate gift of human nature that protects us from making rash decisions. But we can fall prey to propaganda. We have been victims of it here on the right. We believed in fiscal conservatism and were slapped in the face by the reality of big spending republicans. The left believes that the state will deliver them. If we all buy into the need for huge government intervention because we are convinced beyond reason that the financial crisis is too big for private market corrections, than we had all better duck under that umbrella of the federal government.