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Hi, Jozie! Your remarks are always welcome and always relevant! Thanks for your comments addressing the topic!
About my feud with Chris--I agree, it is a waste of time! Let's hope things change for the better in the future.
I see your points, but my intention was not so much to advocate a conspiracy theory as to simply point out that only about 25% (if you take a generous view) of the average person's worldview or perception of reality is actually based on 1st hand experience. The VAST majority of anybody's concept of the universe they live in--anything from 75% to 99%, I would argue--is based on 2nd hand sources. Considering this fact, the issue becomes--how reliable are any of these second-hand sources? Fact is, most of what we accept as truth and fact remains unverified by us--because, quite simply, we don't have the time. We turn to supposedly reliable sources for our information--reputable media outlets, for example, or reliable documentary sources. But how reliable are theses sources really? Quite apart from the possibility of contrivance or fabrication is the issue of cultural or social bias or prejudice, or any other factor that compromises strict factual objectivity. Like the example I cited earlier, if you take any arbitrary news item from, for example, msnbc.com, and strictly analyse it, the truth that comes to light is that 99.9999% of the world only are aware of that piece of information through some second-hand source (and this invariably includes the journalists reporting the story) and the only people who experience it first-hand are the eyewitnesses and others actually involved in the story--around 0.0001% of the world! That's a sobering thought--to me, at least! How reliable, then, is ANY news story? Of course, these statistics are not based on any scientifice study, but are only rough, hypothetical figures that I'm using to illustrate my point. And, of course, they wouldn't apply to something like 9/11, which was witnessed by pretty much everyone--but even an event like that is only witnessed by a few people first hand, strictly speaking. Most people see it only on TV--live, perhaps, but that's still second hand. And even the people who experience it 1st hand only experience a small part of the entire event.
If you imagine yourself locked in a tiny room with only a TV or radio or internet access as your only outlet to the outside world, there would be no way for you to know whether or not everything you watch or listen to or read was totally fabricated or not--no way for you to ever corroborate any of your sources. And that is how most of us live our lives with relation to the media.That's why when a reporter from a reputed Newspaper like the New York Times gets fired for fabricating news stories, leading to the resignation of several of the management at the institution, it raises some serious questions about the reliability of modern journalism. That's just my take on the issue.