The Opinion War!
Battery of Journalists at work (Photo/ Courtesy)
By Peter Kujala
Email, thecoastnewspaper@gmail.com
The media is flooded with all kinds of news and opinions attached to this news such as Trump/Zelensky, Israel/Hamas, crime, healthcare, and environment.
Everyone has strong and determined opinions, often contradictory where you sit at different trenches and send verbal missiles via mobile, on television at work and even my old mother speaks her opinion with weight. But, how do we form our opinions? And who decides what we should think?
Opinions are not created out of thin air, no, there is an input of information that shapes our opinions. And someone deliver this information.
It is journalists, editors and other media players who feed us the information that creates our opinions. Politicians, of course, play a significant role as the media listens to them.
The cultural elite to some extent if we include the entertainment industry as Hollywood and others. The responsibility is thus enormous that these information providers do their job correctly.
An important variable in the context is that everyone actually has preconceived ideological opinions, opinions that you decided to follow a long time ago. Which means that you wear red, blue or green glasses, can be a different colour.
Coloured glasses that completely and automatically filter out information that does not favour your basic ideology, philosophy or belief.
Let us look at the information providers again. Are they doing their job correctly? However, the prerequisite is then uncolored glasses that collect all available information about an event or a happening.
For example, when a top political conversation of 40 minutes is to be referenced and reproduced, only information is given about the final 10 minutes, in addition cut sequences that are shown.
An action that is therefore colored and controlled in advance to suit a preconceived opinion. We, the recipients, get snuffed out on the collected information, the big picture and our opinions don’t get a chance to be independently formed, and the truth becomes what the suppliers make it.
Critical thinking is a term of honour that people like to refer to, but without knowing its meaning. Critical thinking is the analysis of all available facts, evidence and observations to form a well-founded opinion or conclusion.
So, who adopts these criteria? Journalists, professors and various “experts”. Hardly, they themselves sit with colored glasses and fight among themselves in opposing opinions.
The ethics of professional journalists is to provide accurate news, which should of course mean news based on All available information. Hand on heart and head, honestly now, none of us have or even want all available information to form truthful opinions.
It doesn’t take much analytical skills to realize, we all get brainwashed, we just choose which brainwashing we adopt based on our ideological stance.
Humans are actually quite stupid, and the stupidest are those who most certainly think they know best.
Let us humbly face the situation, we do not know everything, hardly anything, but we choose our opinions based on inner convictions; partly ideologically shaped a long time ago and partly based on the information we are fed with on a daily basis.
A famous religious founder said “by the fruit we know the tree”. Choose the “tree/brainwashing” that gives life meaningful and good fruit.
