So, I was cruising around the good ol' Tube of You last night and ran across a segment that made a lot of sense to me. It was a few minutes by Greg Gutfeld, who I don't really watch because I don't watch much TV, but he gave a name to something I talk about all the time; The Gell-Mann Effect.
About twenty years ago, I used to write a Guest Opinion column for my local newspaper. I started writing them when I complained to the then editor Jim Smith. I said the person writing some of the pieces in the paper didn't know what they were writing about. Agriculture, ranching, animal husbandry, etc. He was also running editorials from some of their affiliated newspapers from the bay area. Those pieces had zero context to our more rural community. His answer was something like, Well, if you can write content that people like, I'll publish it. I wrote guest opinion pieces off and on for a few years. It was fun, even though I am a barely functional writer.
When I was in college at SC, (Solano College. I told you I was a barely functional writer) one of my favorite classes was my media class. The instructor had been in the news/marketing business for years. He was the one who first told me about the Gell-Mann Effect without giving it a name.
He said we have been taught that everything written in the newspaper is true, and the same for what was shown on the nightly news. He said that the vast majority of articles in a newspaper, especially a local one, is written by someone who knows next to nothing about the nuts and bolts of what they are writing about. They just know how to write. If you know a lot about the subject they are writing on, you will find many, if not most, things are somewhat, or flat-out wrong. Once you realize this, you start to wonder about all the other 'news' pieces they write or cover. Are those stories true? That is the Gell-Mann Effect.
For you younger folks, newspapers were actual news articles, ads for groceries, cars, clothing, homes, and classified ads, printed on real paper, folded up, and thrown at your front door every morning by a kid on a bicycle. Think of newspapers as whatever app you use for news, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Linkedin, Tik Tok, Fandango, IMDB, and about twenty more, all folded, and rolled up at your door.
So anyway, Gutfeld's story was about the recent election, and he put to words something I've been feeling for quite some time. Trump's victory was, in part, a result of the Gell-Mann Effect. People who watch their own brand of 'news', from NPR, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, or just get their news from the left, have been told that Trump is actually Hitler. What's worse, is they were told that anyone who votes for Trump is a Nazi.
This is where your own brain starts to throw a 'check engine' light to you subconscious. You start thinking, hey, what about my neighbor Sal, and Jessie? I've known them for years, and had dinners at their house. They helped me so much when my mom got sick. They watched the house for us, and were there to talk about everything I was dealing with. They voted for Trump, and they are not Nazis. Hmm.
Bingo.
Once you figure out the legacy media's narrative of Trump being Hitler, and half the country who voted for him are Nazis, is all nonsense, you start to wonder what else they are lying about?
You start remembering the RussiaGate story they pushed for four years that was fake. The FBI did actually spy on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election cycle. They falsified FISA documents to get warrants to tap phones, but you were told by the legacy media that this was a 100% fake story put out by the Trump camp. You remember Hunter Biden's laptop story? Where the FBI knew the laptop was real, it belonged to Hunter Biden, and all the emails and information on it were authentic? Yeah, they knew all that as soon as they got the laptop.
Yet they told Facebook and Twitter, and all the legacy media, it was Russian disinformation. They told the social media companies to bury any mention of the story on their platforms. They even got 51 intelligence officials to say the story was Russian disinformation. (By the way, have you heard an apology from those 51 'intelligence experts' yet?)
No one in the legacy media wanted to ask any questions about this story. They ran with because it worked against Trump, and anything, fake or otherwise, that hurt Trump's chances was printed and opined everyday, every month, for years.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) he offered a few independent reporters to look into the emails of the Twitter interactions with the federal government and other media. They found the feds were try to get social media companies to bury certain stories that were harmful to the government's narrative on the Covid-19 response. This was daming information of government-influenced censorship. Did you hear much about the Twitter Files on you legacy news feeds? Nope, you sure didn't.
I could go on and on for the next three hours telling you about the stories the legacy media ran that were mostly, or completely false, but what I want you to come away with is the fact that they actively suppress stories that go against their own political views. What you don't hear is sometimes more harmful than the things they get half right, or flat-out lie about.
I will also give out a word of warning to some of my Super-Trumper friends who only listen to Fox News, or NewMax or even Alex Jones. While Fox leans right on their news programs, some of their opinion shows lean pretty far-right. I don't watch Fox, but like the Gutfeld clip I found on YouTube, I know their content. Some of the super-right media sites are garbage. While they do serve up red meat for the Trump fans, they take a lot of soundbites out of context, or cut and paste things to make them sound worse than they are. If they get it wrong, they ignore it.
Don't trust people who never own up to their mistakes. You can watch the legacy media fail this test in real-time, right now.
Here's a nickel's worth of free advice for you: Google is not going to help you in getting better news or information. They are the largest legacy media source out there. If you Google the stories I mentioned above, you will need to go a few pages into the searches to get past all the legacy media pieces about how these stories are wrong, or no big deal. It's frustrating for sure.
X (Twitter) is the best place to get information, and weed through news stories. The Community Notes feature is pretty cool. If someone makes a false comparison, or makes an error in a story, users can reply or make a Community Note that gives the other side.
My point: Start asking questions about things you believe.
Start asking if they could be wrong, and if so, how wrong? Some of the things I once thought were correct turned out to be wrong, and I've changed my opinion on them.
One the best things is finding smart, reasonable people, who were once on the other side of a topic, but were moved by an uncomfortable truth to start asking questions.
I'll give you a bit of warning here, there is a price to pay for this. Once you start asking your side uncomfortable questions, your friends won't want to answer them. They might call you horrible names, and even shut you out of your group. It's not fun, but it's better in the long run. You won't be living in a false world.
Your reward is living in world as true as you can make it.
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