h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

While I'm not sure I can 'trust the media' for the specifics of information, I do use them occasionally for generalities: A plane explodes over some city or ocean.....people are killed and hurt..... That kind of story doesn't require a great deal of background or context.

Political situations that have ongoing quarrels, social implications and tremendous emotional charges around them (Ireland, Afghanistan, East Timor, Bosnia, etc) DO require tremendous background and context - which no medium outside books has the time, space or inclination to discuss.

Television is the most impatient and powerful device for stirring up emotions: sound and image, properly filtered, can convince anyone of anything....especially when the mind receiving the material is non-critical/judgemental about the information coming in. The twin factors of an impatient population, which wants material compressed into the briefest space possible for instant consumption (and forgettability), combined with the corporate desire to increase revenues by grabbing the largest possible audience each time, results in chunked information without the context to wrap around it.
Television, radio and often print suffer from this, and only Journalism students are likely to buy several different papers or record different newscasts and examine the bias put onto the story by the corporate owners in how the story is presented.

New media is supposedly free of all these financial constraints, yet one look at how much crap there is on the web, as well as how many corporations have 'news' sites (which are constantly updated) should tell you something about how reliable the information on the web is. Particularly involving medical info, many have said to check up on the information presented in detail because so much of it is, at best useless and at worst, dangerous.

For all media, stirring passions is easy and requires little planning or thought. Stirring minds is infinitely more difficult and requires tremendous preparation.....more than there is air-time for and certainly money budgeted for.....and probably have fewer receiving sets available (how many people will admit to thinking for the fun of it?).

Fruitbat