Deliberately Inflamitory Statement

It don't think mass media outlets in the US are biased. And the polls don't lie either.

Because we have put such enormous commerical pressure on news outlets we see two phenomenon:

1. Only giving people the news that their target audience wants to hear and only saying it the way they want to hear it.

2. The target audience is less well-read in history, culture, and frankly doesn't read as well. That is not to insult Americans so much as it to observe that the educational achievement in this country has seen a net decline.

3. By the way one of the things that mass media news consumers want to hear are news stories that say "Mass media news outlets are biased"

The danger of all of this is that if enough people believe something that was subjective to begin with, then it becomes more true by definition. For some reason the preceeding statement gave lots of people the screaming fits when I would say that at Rice, but its not my fault that they didn't take epistemology. So here's how it works:

"Better cola" is defined by the cola that people prefer.

"Slurm is a better cola than soylent soda" (Get 144 million of your friends to say that three times fast) Boom! Now its true.

Need another example:

"A good political leader gets the public at large to support him"

"Arnold Swarzenegger is a good political leader"

If I believe it then it becomes that much more true.

Not understanding it yet?

"He who smelt it... "