honorentheos wrote:The urge to react with emotion or to be First! to reply to something with the response that gets the most likes all play into making it less informative. But one has the ability to turn the volume down on those impulses, take the time to fact check.
Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're conflating 2 problems:
The fact that we live an avalanche of media noise.
Donald Trumps lies all the time
It seems to me that one of the things the Trump administration does is to rely on the amount of white noise they make. It is important to point out the lies Donald Trump says, even if they are now common. As far as fact checking, I'm not sure if that is related. The 2 tweets speak for themselves.
I'm not sure we've ever had a President who was so prolific in their lies. But history is replete with periods of time in the US when the news was practically a war of competing lies. The period of US colonialism around the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century was championed by so-called yellow journalism where outright lies made up the headlines that sold papers, made fortunes and led the US into war with Spain while we were butchering the peoples of the Philippines fighting for their independence in that period's version of the Vietnam War. One could argue that had the reporting then been the same as what the American people saw on their TV's during the Tet Offensive and throughout the rest of the war we may not have stuck around.
I certainly believe that right wing media has changed the information landscape for the worse and made it what it is today. But I don't think that I'm conflating anything when I argue that for all of the issues today it's not something so unheard of that we have descended into a truly post-truth world. A person CAN live with their heads buried in such a world, and from any political position at that. But the world didn't change such that we're talking about needing a new paradigm to figure crap out. Anyone who thinks the news should come to them pre-chewed so they don't have to work is naïve. BUT, and this it the second part of my post quoted above, I do think that the tendency to jump to conclusions while fishing for a like in social media culture is a habit that contributes to someone neglecting to apply basic critical thinking skills. One can't get lit up with outrage over the last Fox News or HuffPo headline and also maintain perspective. And if one's peer group has their pitchforks out and is charging over a hill, or one is engaged in mortal Facebook comment combat with their cranky dittohead uncle it's going to be even more tempting to follow along rather than pause to assess the facts first.
I can't stand what Trump has done to the country. But I also view what he's doing as an extension of what was going on elsewhere before him. And I firmly believe that things aren't so bad that one can't keep their feet on the ground or shelter from the media onslaught.
Last edited by Guest on Mon Jul 02, 2018 3:24 am, edited 1 time in total.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
honor I don't really feel like starting a new thread for what I was referring to so putting it here. I'm a little reluctant because I don't want it to cause a derail. Anyway it's about the story of Jahi McMath that began in 2013. She recently died (that's a matter of debate central to her story) and how they are reporting on the surgery that initially caused her to become brain dead (again, that's the central debate). There'll be a post mortem study on her brain that will hopefully settle the debate or open up a new one. My concern is that some parents will be afraid to greenlight routine tonsillectomies because that's what they're saying she had (and have made the same error from the start) and that is not the case.
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
Chinese Proverb
Thanks, Jersey Girl. I could see how a parent reading a kid died, or suffered brain death, following tonsillectomy surgery might over-estimate the risk without knowing the particular surgery in the story involved additional complications. So I think I see what you are saying. It does seem the story I saw about the death on the NPR website from a couple of days ago focused on the debate over that family's fight to keep her on support despite the doctors and a judge ruling she was brain dead and simply noted the original surgery was a tonsillectomy without describing it as complicated or routine. I don't know about that one as from one side it doesn't seem to be in conflict with regards to the procedure as it didn't qualify it as either complex or routine, but I can see your take on it and assume you are more tied in to the social groups where the focus would be on the fear of the procedure causing someone to overestimate the risks compared with the need.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth? ~ Eiji Yoshikawa
honor, here are quotes from recent reports on Jahi McMath. Trying to make this as unobtrusive as I can so as not to derail. There were more. Some sources were accurate in describing the complex surgery or referred to it as throat surgery. Yes, what appears below would be disturbing to at least a portion of parents and has the power to influence their choices.
NPR
McMath had been on a ventilator since 2013. In December of that year, she had a tonsillectomy at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland in California, which resulted in complications. Doctors there said McMath had irreversible brain damage, and a coroner issued a death certificate.
McMath's case drew national attention when her family refused to accept the conclusion of doctors who declared the girl dead in December 2013, when she was 13, after suffering irreversible brain damage during routine surgery in California to remove her tonsils