Monday, July 23, 2007

paranoid, or cautiously vigilant?

“Making us paranoid” could be one way to describe the purpose of our class…it depends on your definition of “paranoid.” If you have to make the teacher evil, I guess you could say he’s killing our sense of faith and trust (if we had any to begin with) in the things we accept as truthful. At first what Tim was saying about how the media and government controls our thoughts through ads and propaganda seemed pretty unfounded, but then I started looking at stuff for the midterm and media monitoring project…
This whole thing about questioning what’s true and what’s a lie is all over the place – you don’t have to go around trying to analyze some cryptic statement or presidential speech or even know much about what’s going on. One article in Sunday’s San Jose Mercury News flat out stated how unreliable our version of the truth is…
The American version of the truth: in the middle of the night, American troops had come under fire from gunmen in a residential area in Baghdad. The troops responded with gunfire and missile-carrying attack helicopters, dropping a bomb on the buildings where the shots were coming from. An American military spokesman man explained the seven explosions that occurred immediately after were probably caused by explosives store within the building they bombed. Iraqi police reported that the six people killed were insurgents, and the homes were probably used to store weapons.
The version of the truth presented by Iraqis who lived nearby: the area bombed was controlled by an army militia - the people who were killed came from two poor Shiite Muslim families who didn’t even own rifles. Two men, two women, and seven children – eleven in total – were killed. One man took pictures of several covered bodies, including two child-sized ones.
But when each side was presented with the other’s version of what happened, both altered their stories: the locals admitted to hearing gunfire before the bombings and the U.S. no longer asserted that only insurgents had been killed.
So both sides were “modifying” the truth, but by how much? Which version is more true? How can we know what we hear is true, when articles and reports of our government’s inconsistencies, contradictions, and scandals fill up every reliable news source? Sheesh…even thinking about how one would go about discerning truth from lies makes my brain go soggy.

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