Just like I described last week, I grew up fully immersed in the belief that certain news sources exhibited prejudicial, liberal bias. Other sources told the truth and only those beleaguered few told the truth. In high school, I avidly consumed news from two primary sources, World Magazine and Fox news. Upon graduation, my great-uncle gifted me a year’s subscription to Newsweek, back when it still came out weekly in print. Even though little else in my life changed at that point, I started to consume news from a different perspective at the same time that I began to delve into historiography which taught me much in evaluating my sources as I compiled my own written works. This brought me to a much better position, one of discernment and one I see little of today even before the current crisis.

Speaking of the current crisis, I have seen an overwhelming amount of media distrust. So many people and not just the ones who routinely spout this sort of thing-trying vehemently to prove the point that we cannot trust the media. They don’t tell the story. They lie. They just want to stir up fear and hysteria because it benefits their bottom line. For so long, I have heard these claims and looked on them skeptically, the historian and literary analysis inside me casting aspersions on their claims. This time, however, I could not let this go. I had to speak out and I choose to do so with this post.

The problem with the ideology follows. First, only one infallible document exists in this world, the Bible because God wrote that using human hands. Uninspired man writes everything else and anything that man writes bears at least a taint of bias. I teach that to my seventh graders as part of seventh grade ELA standards. I teach them to read with discernment to glean not only the basic information but also the perspective of the author. I even go so far as to tell them that everything they read will have some sort of bias. When I tell them that, I do not leave it there. I teach them how to glean the facts from the text while acknowledging the bias. I do this with everything I read. When I read an article, I first check the source of the article. If I do not have any familiarity with the source, I look up information on the source to determine at least a surface view of potential bias. I also never base my entire opinion on one document only.

Second, once you begin to distrust everyone, you quickly descend into an echo chamber, listening only to those who support your beliefs. For example, a couple weeks ago, CNN posted an article that appeared to parrot the official government run paper of the Chinese Navy. I had seen that article briefly when first published and jumped to no conclusions. I believed that CNN simple reported the words of the Chinese government controlled media and took that with the grain of salt that one should knowing how the government controls its press. CNN has published and continues to publish statements from leaders across the globe from the head of the WHO, to Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo, Japanese Prime Minister, and many others. These articles present quotes and a few sentences of explanation. The above referenced article presented clearly indicated quotes from the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army. The only reason that I even returned to this article was because a family member of mine posted an article published by Fox News. Fox News took the CNN article and presented an argument that CNN serves the Chinese Communist agenda and should be called Xi NN. Xi is simply the transliteration of the letter “C” in Chinese. By doing this, one implies an inherent evilness of a language. The Fox News article goes on to claim that CNN’s article generated uproar on social media and demonstrated this by including three tweets from people with bonafide conservative credentials which the article also takes time to point out, the echo chamber in full force.

Our paradigms establish our filters, in some cases it forms the walls of our echo chamber. If you build your paradigm on the belief that the liberal media lies, you have no trouble believing that shady government officials tell medical examiners and coroners to log the cause of every non-violent death as COVID19 to support the false narrative of how deadly the virus is. This makes sense in that sort of an echo chamber despite others presenting the realities of paperwork back up or new, enhanced testing methods to explain sudden increase in numbers.

We cannot escape paradigms, nor should we wish to since they form the basis for how we acquire knowledge. Rather, we should be willing to adjust and reform our paradigms when we encounter information that does not fit into that paradigm. For example, as a child I had the faulty paradigm that the word “college” was synonymous with Bob Jones University. I could not fathom other post high school institutions. After all, the only information that came to my paradigm fit inside that. I went to school on the campus. All of my family members obtained their degrees from Bob Jones University. I attended a church at that time with close ties to the university. What else should I think as a child? Obviously, I have modified my paradigm. After all, I have taken classes from five different institutions, in my academic career. I do not remember when I altered that paradigm and can only imagine what sort of distortions I would have to make to keep up that childhood paradigm. All of us have those childhood paradigms and find them adorable when we see them in children. It’s when full grown adults refuse to let go of those error-ridden paradigms that they inflict the greatest damage.