I’m thinking today that we all live in a type of illusion. It comes to mind that our realities are dictated by many events that create what we think is real whether it is or not. Recently, I’ve been thinking how unsuccessful the world is at accurate communication which affects the way we think about things. The wonders of the human mind are great. We think what it tells us is real. We can’t really be sure without direct experience, yet we believe what authorities tell us because we created respected authorities to tell us what’s real, even if they are not respectable in reality, even if they lie.
The recent example, of course, which comes to mind is this "Russiagate" thing, the lies reported as truth because people wanted to hear them. It increased ratings; it didn’t matter to the news authorities if they were true or not. The mainstream media are just there to pass along the propaganda, to guide minds. The focus is not really about truth but about money. The news might be more appealing if it were the truth, in my opinion, but the truth, again, is elusive if you don’t experience it directly, and, of course, TV reporters don’t even leave their luxury apartments to check on reality.
The real truth tellers are now held in contempt; held in solitary confinement; held in embassies against their will, or forced to live in exile. This last week has taught us that two years of bogus lies are really what our news organizations want. Now they are looking utterly foolish and no one will ever apologize for what they’ve done these two years avoiding the many truths that could have been sought out and reported on. The evidence is obvious. Now Americans should investigate the media and separate it from political or corporate influence as a collective unit of its own merit with actual ethics and rules.
This is not to suggest the authorities in power now reform the media. Those authorities seek only propaganda or censorship. What is called for is a community of trained journalists, not communications majors, but trained journalists to gather in a consortium and make rules that are sane and conducive to truth telling. The truth does exist somewhere in the actual events, in actual people who saw the events, not in some amorphous, compromised committee of superficial conformists.
Until the news media are totally reformed by real journalists and until that media becomes self-regulating and independent of special interests, the people in this country will have to simply intuit the truth. We did. We were right.