Sunday 25 March 2018

To believe, or not to believe (and I’m not talking about God)

To believe, or not to believe - no I’m not talking about God.

But I am talking about the News - with a capital N because it seems to be shouted at us from all corners of social media at the moment. But how much is actually true?

Some, of course, is verifiable. If England, say (just supposing), were to win a football match 1-0 there can be no dispute about the score. But the meaning of that score depends on who you believe - they might have played wonderfully and only the referee deprived them of another five goals, or they might have been lucky to scrape a win. 

And there are many times when even the facts can’t speak for themselves. Those of in the UK know that the promise to put £350,000,000 a week into the NHS after we leave the EU was a lie - but that didn’t stop politicians quoting it. This last week, some health service workers have been promised what looks, at first sight, like a generous pay rise. But when you work out their loss of real income over the last ten years this comes nowhere near making up for it.

Ideas ... facts ... the two become jumbled on social media. I’ve seen demands that supermarkets stop using single-use plastic - all very laudable, given the rubbish in our seas (verifiable) but without reminding us that significantly more energy is used to make glass bottles than plastic. I’ve seen a petition that demands the government does not sign a trade deal with the US as it will jeopardise the NHS - but without any evidence that is the case. Instinct tells me that such a deal is a Bad Idea, but that isn’t enough - I want to be presented with enough information to make an informed decision and not just sound-bites and petitions.

Does it matter? I think it does. In this instant-information world few of us have the time or inclination to research anything with enough vigour to develop informed opinions. We are dependent on the media to keep us informed - but the media simply feeds us snippets of largely unverifiable facts and great tracts of opinion. 


Which means politicians can talk about listening to the electorate safe in the knowledge that we have no idea what is true and what isn’t.

8 comments:

  1. Oh Jo, you are so right. These days so much news is either not completely true, manipulated truth or simply fake, it is very hard to know what to believe. I have read somewhere that this is a kind of politics of chaos that is a deliberate move to confuse us to the point where we can no longer make reliable decisions and the politicians can do and say whatever they want. I find it a disturbing development.

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    1. So do I, Val - on the one hand they say they must listen to ‘the people’ and then confuse us till we can’t think any more.

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  2. absolutely! and they can say whatever they like and go unchallenged. I think we live n very dangerous times...and I fear for our kids, who are growing up with all this rubbish chucked into their minds day by day!

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    1. Oh so do I - I watch them scrolling through Facebook and believe absolutely everything. I know schools try to teach them to think for themselves, but those little screens have become all-powerful.

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  3. Another point about news is how they select what they cover and how they cover it. The main news sources often ignore important stories that are only uncovered by alternative news outlets or by groups I am a member of and so I get their emails and magazines. That is frustrating.

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    1. I agree - and we can only think about stuff we can find to read or hear about. And almost all of it comes from a different point of view with reality distorted among what they claim to be facts.

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  4. What a timely post, what with Cambridge Analytica apparently in cahoots with Facebook. We've fallen into a vicious circle, difficult to get otu of because of the complexities. It's like quick sand and we're up to our waist. :-(

    Greetings from London.

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    1. And while we are in up to our waists, our children barely have their heads above the do-do. How do we pull them out?

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