Wallowing In Fear

Somewhere in between the fear-mongering mainstream news outlets and the little DIY crackpot conspiracy news blogs, the truth lies. Somewhere there is a news source that doesn't report lies as truth. Somewhere, sports and celebrity gossip are relegated to the sidelines instead of being presented to the public as news that matters. The current state of affairs wouldn't be so problematic if people consumed with thought and checked sources. On Facebook, I often see people linking to stories that are either patently untrue or outright satire. The comedy site, Failbook, is a good place to find examples of this kind of thing, although the examples themselves might be faked too. The solution seems to be to trust nobody. That said, I've even seen people state distrust for fact-checking sites like Snopes based on political disagreements with the people behind the site. How can we be so gullible yet so mistrusting at the same time? The answer, of course, is that people believe what they want to believe and either ignore or spew bile about anything that clashes with whatever belief system they follow. Either way, the corporate shit shovels keep scooping steaming piles of "news" into our open mouths, and we keep asking for more.

That said, satire sites like The Onion are more likely to touch on what Werner Herzog calls "ecstatic truth" than most of the mainstream media news sites. The problem is that some people take it as literal truth.

Speaking of truth, one of the current hot topics is Ebola, which was identified back in the seventies, but is only now appearing on the radars of the sheltered citizens of the U.S. The media is doing its best to stoke the fires of panic, and many of the stories I've seen are full of what is basically grim speculation. Grim speculation isn't news. Ebola is scary enough on its own, of course, but the media seems determined to create panic.

Here is a site that seems to be taking a different approach, so if you want a more balanced look at the current epidemic, click away.