SANITY IN SPITE OF THE MEDIA

Today everybody knows that the news is not exactly the epitome of sanity. Today we know that what is called “the news” is 90% bad news—news of tragedies, catastrophes, diseases, disasters, war, threats of war, inflation, government corruption, riots, and on and on. If something bad happened, it is “news.” If something good happened, well, that is fine, but don’t expect it to make the evening news.

Now there is just something wrong and twisted about that. As a culture, we discount the good stuff in order to highlight, foreground, and devote lots of energy to the bad stuff. Giving it that much attention and energy of course, implies that the bad is more important than the good. Of course, if you do that in your relationships, you are “looking for a fight.” John Gottman’s research indicated that for every negative word or exchange, you need five positive words or exchanges just to stay even. So, what does that say about our social relationships with each other when the news is 90% negative?

Now if only that was the only thing wrong with the media, but it isn’t. The media is not only overly focused on the negative, which is obvious, today it is mostly biased and prejudiced, which is not so obvious. How much? I don’t know. Some media outlets seem to be nearly 100% biased, others only 70 or 80%, but they are all biased. Each media outlet has for the most part stopped providing journalism and is now into advocacy and persuasion. Some are fully into propaganda. The “woke” agenda that drives so much of the mainline media has gotten to the point where Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian future is well underway. No longer can you count on the words or names they use to mean what they have traditionally meant. And when a Secretary of Education cannot even define “woman,” you know things have gotten really weird and completely biased.

For decades, we have been aware that various media outlets have been “spinning” the facts. And to some extent, this is inevitable given the nature of human perception and thinking. Putting a positive (or negative) spin on things comes with our subjectivity. We cannot be fully and absolutely objective. But now spinning the facts and the truth has reached a crazy level. Biden’s big announce in August that we have “Zero” inflation is a case in point. Zero inflation? This was not only a spin of the truth, but completely out of context. If he had said “from July’s inflation rate of 7.1% to August’s inflation rate” it is zero, that would have been understandable. But he did not. He left the impression that there is no inflation—a completely false idea.

To stay sane in the midst of the current agenda-driven and highly biased nature of the media— you and I have to do a lot of critical thinking. Otherwise we will be brainwashed with the media’s propaganda. Critical thinking means questioning what you hear, the language it is coded in, and the hidden presuppositions that are implied but not stated.

Media today inevitably controls our perspective of things. By presenting only the facts that fits with a given media’s agenda, by taking facts out of context, by quoting someone only in part, by presenting 15 negative stories about someone and only 1 counter-balancing positive story, all of these influence the so-called “facts” that we use to reason. Once upon a time you could hear both sides of an issue on any news broadcast. Today that is becoming increasingly rare.

Like the “January 6 Commission,” which conducted all of their interviews and questioning from only one perspective. Those Representatives who could have questioned and interviewed from the other perspective were cast off of the commission and not even allowed to participate. Just knowing that tells you that those in charge of the commission already had their conclusions and the hearings were designed to confirm what they already wanted to prove. It had nothing to do with a search for truth.

Recent corrections and apologies from the CDC (Center for Disease Control) revealed that they had put out a lot of mis-information about shots, masks, social distancing, etc. As it turns out, getting the shot did not prevent covid and masking children does more harm than good. If you listened uncritically to the media, you would have accepted a lot of false information.

For training in critical thinking, there’s no better place to begin than with the NLP Meta-Model of Language. You can find it in The Structure of Magic (1975) and the extended Meta-Model in Communication Magic (2001). Just knowing how language works in our neurology will give you a great heads up for how to be an independent thinker in a biased media environment.

To then deepen your critical thinking skills, Executive Thinking (2018) provides lists of cognitive biases, distortions, and fallacies to be wary of. And because bias is built into the human brain as default patterns for thinking and reasoning, once you know what these are, and become practiced in recognizing them, you can save yourself from a lot of unsanity.