I take back everything I wrote a few weeks ago about how beautiful the winter was this year. I spoke too soon. Obviously, I believed Puxatawny Phil’s prognostication that winter was over and from past experience, we know that he lies a lot.
It’s easy to look at the interpretation of a groundhog’s behavior, used for years as a predictor of spring, and acknowledge that it is an amusing but seldom exact representation of the truth. Unfortunately, most of us are not so adept at recognizing the difference between opinion and fact in the media these days.
I have been writing for the Gazette for several years. I have never thought that what I am writing is anything but opinion. This is the opinion page, after all, not page one. Some of my opinions are based on fact, and whenever I state a fact, I research it to the best of my ability, although I admit that I rely on Google for my research sometimes and that requires fact checking the sources as well.
Social media is a great example of a platform where facts fall by the wayside and gossip, opinion, innuendo and even humor are forwarded as truth. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a story from “The Babylon Bee” forwarded on Facebook as truth. We have a very gullible society where doctored videos and falsehoods are accepted if they conform to our preconceived ideas.
Few people realize what a threat gullibility is to our freedom. Being able to differentiate between opinion and fact is one of the reasons why education is so important, but I fear (and this is just my opinion) that much of education today is indoctrination rather than teaching. We are creating a younger generation that cannot think for themselves but is ready to fight for ideas based on heresay and false accusations. The Jussie Smollett situation was a sad illustration of how fast people are to jump to conclusions before examining the facts. People used to have a ‘gut feel’ that something was not right, but we lose those abilities when our education system teaches what to think rather than exposing students to factual truth and letting them decide for themselves.
It isn’t just in the classroom that we are losing the ability to separate fact from fiction. Journalism is suffering the same fate for more than one reason. The so called news channels have become opinion pages with the occasional news headline thrown in. I remember first watching CNN when they covered the various foreign wars and you saw the reporters in flack helmets, waiting for the next barrage to explode in front of them. That was not an opinion.
Now, members of the news media have become celebrities, abdicating their journalistic responsibilities for ratings. Those same reporters sit at a desk and tell us what they want us to believe as factual when it is merely their opinion. They are directing our minds and wills towards the response and outcome that they want.
That is why local news and journalism is so important. Local newspapers are disappearing at an alarming rate, but local news is much more likely to be based on fact rather than opinion. It’s hard to accuse someone of something that is mere conjecture when you may run into them or their mother in the grocery store. The local news gives us what we need to know. What the city commission is voting on, what streets are going to be shut down for repairs, the newest store opening, who just had a new baby, who is moving on to another position, and who has died. None of this is conjecture. It’s fact.
We all have opinions and local newspapers make it possible for us to share those opinions with our fellow citizens. The Gazette is blessed to have a lot of citizens who are not afraid and are willing to take the time to write down their thoughts and opinions to share with the citizenry of this fair city. I think most of the Gazette’s readers recognize that one of the beauties of this country is that we don’t all think alike or express ourselves in the same way. That’s what separates us from the more oppressive societies like communism. Journalism may not always be objective, but as long as we have page four of the Gazette, the public will have the ability to challenge opinion that has been stated as fact.
Speaking of facts, we began daylight savings this week and it has messed my timing up once more. I could say that spring has finally arrived, but that is just my opinion.