If you have a tile or hardwood floor in your home, I have an experiment for you to try. If you are familiar with the visual trick where you close one eye to view something and then close the other eye and the thing you’re viewing appears to move, you will have the basis for this observation.
Find a kitchen chair, sit down, and watch the reflections from the lights on the floor. Find a seam or another item on the floor to use as a point of reference. Then close one eye and note the perceived location of the reflection. Open your eye and close the other. Did the reflection move in relation to your reference point? If your test goes as mine did, the reflection and the reference seem to move. This phenomenon is due to the position of your eyes. Because our eyes invert light that passes into them, relative location of objects we see with only one eye shifts when we shift to the other eye. Using both eyes ‘corrects’ this and allows us to see the true position of objects.
While you are sitting in your chair, slowly move your head from side to side while watching the reflection. Now the reference remains in one place, but the reflections are moving across the floor because we are viewing the floor from a different angle. In my first blog post on this site, I alluded to this very phenomenon when I described a residential building that looks different from a range of angles.
These phenomena happen because our brains are hard-wired to detect changes in our environment to place more importance in how we view them. When the world around us is at the mercy of our brains, our thoughts, our emotions, and our perceptions will always vary from person to person.
When we blame someone for seeing current events or political issues in the wrong way, we are trying to apply a rigid set of rules to perception. In one of my recent ventures to the internet, I came across a comment saying that no true Christian would ever approve of testing fetal tissue for pathology or to research new ways of treating diseases the way our species always has. Was this person’s perspective wrong? Only from the assumption that only he or she was right and everyone else was wrong. If you look at it in a different way, our religion instructs us to be like God. Does God approve of us trying to better our lives through education and research? And didn’t God first make an experiment by taking the rib from Adam and turning it into Eve? To me, God seems like a fair representation of what it means to be Christian even if He himself is not a Christian.
I have seen many people blame the media for everything they don’t like. Has your favorite politician been caught doing something unsavory? Blame the media. Is the current health crisis causing you economic hardship? Blame the media. Did someone get shot to death primarily because of the color of his skin? Blame the media. To some, the media has become a perfectly vague scapegoat because we as humans tend to look for ways to shift blame for our own failures.
The news media is biased, but some of us have forgotten the fact that all media is inherently biased because man conforms to his own built-in biases. All books, movies, television, games, magazines, newspapers, and family newsletters exhibit bias. But we don’t need to blame the media because of these biases. The better approach, in my mind, would be to consider the bias of the people writing and editing the story you are reading. When we factor that in, we allow ourselves to read what is being reported in a way that relates to our own biases.
You, the reader, are also biased and good writers, content curators, game makers, etc. are aware of it and rely heavily upon it to relate to you. In a word, bias isn’t bad or wrong. It’s human nature.
People who claim they never read biased news are lying, because all news is biased. I’m not saying that media outlets never knowingly publish factually incorrect material. After all, mistakes are also part of human nature. It is our job to decide whether or not the news appeals to us and sufficiently presents verified information. If we decide that it doesn’t, we are free to read the news from a different source. Relying on a single source of information for all our news is a great way to lose sight of what truly makes America great.
Our great experiment was built on mankind’s penchant for creativity. For that creativity to flourish, we need to experiment, make observations, predict outcomes, build things, fail, and try again.
Unfortunately, many have become so rigid in their thinking that they view experimentation and creativity as threats to their opinion and seek to battle that threat. Indeed it is true that asking questions, testing, and making things are threats to the way we view things. We do it because man lives to challenge himself. If we think we know something, we look at it again from a different perspective.
God asks us to better ourselves. Science, creativity, ingenuity, and problem-solving are our avenues to expand our knowledge. Questioning what the media prints is good. Assuming it is all false because people are biased is not.
We writers depend on truth. Whether fiction or non-fiction, our stories need to be built on the truth because readers are smart enough to know when they are being lied to and will seek other media when they detect that dishonesty.
Politicians love to tell us the news is lying because doing so distracts from their own dishonesty. Believing in everything a politician says no matter the facts and observations is a type of cult behavior.
Science-Fiction writer Isaac Asimov famously opined that “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
The experiment and promise of our nation demands that we learn about ourselves and our world through any and all media. If we give into ignorance as Asimov warned, our society can and will collapse. Expecting honesty from what we read is one thing, but we must also be honest with ourselves, or we dilute everything that we as a nation stand for.