If there is one thing the media loves, it’s talking about how the golden age of media is behind us. Once upon a time, there were stout newsmen who told it like it was and gave us a sense of national unity. This golden age is set between World War I and the Vietnam War but definitively ends with Watergate. Is it any wonder that the era that begins with the government professionalizing its relationship with the press to control messaging would culminate in a War based on a lie and a massive Presidential coverup?

Of course, the journalistic line on Watergate is to claim Nixon’s scalp, but also ignoring its culture of Washington insiders reliant on the government messaging for day to day reporting. The Cable News era roughly follow that same pattern, culminating in Fox News as a messaging platform for the various arms of the GOP. As CNN and MSNBC scrambled to replicate vitriolic messaging and boxes of people shouting at each other while a crawl of information runs across the bottom, our entire media population comprised people not trained with bullshit filters.

Our current media landscape, especially online, resembles the era when every city had dozens of newspapers. Each had its own angle and point of view, and people lived in their bubbles of ideological purity. Of course, this is the era that birthed labor riots, prohibition, and the very unrest that Wilson clamped down on in his massive expansion of the state. Almost everything Conservatives and Liberals alike hate about the modern Federal Government was birthed during his presidency.

Okay, that half-informed rant got us way off track.

The massive changes to culture make us feel as if the relatively brief era of “consensus journalism” is worth resurrecting. However, so much of that era came down to how much control Government and Industry flexed over what people were told, and it unraveled as it became clear how much of it was pure bullshit.

Facebook and Twitter spend their time promoting things that make you angry so that you stay on the site longer. Google learns what you like to read and tends to ensure you keep in your bubble. I think most people are content in their bubbles; it’s the other people’s bubbles we worry about. Of course, everyone else is insanely polluted by bias, and our own bubble is created by facts and logic.

The first step to recognizing you have a media problem is to realize that you are full of shit. Then, you can relax. Telling everyone to go out there and consume every bit of news from every ideological angle is not only unrealistic in term of its time commitment, it would drive people insane.

So instead when reading something learn to deconstruct it. You don’t need anything special to do this. What is the information in this article? Is it reporting a fact and interpreting it, or is it speculation? Worse yet, is it speculation about why someone else is speculating. It’s bullshit all the way down.

Image Credit: Gerry Dincher