I was skimming through Facebook this morning when I came across this post from Justin Sullivan, shared via the Greater Overbeagle FPA, who stated: “We cannot agree more…”
Me too.
Is the penny finally dropping that people don’t like being lied to by the media (whether that’s “mainstream”, “specialist”, “political” or “social”)? It’s about time, because while one side of most every debate likes to shout about the “fake news” being peddled by the other, it seems clear that neither side is particularly truthful when an image or story suits or supports their narrative. And some individuals (I’m looking at you, Bradyn) seem to think that that approach is completely reasonable.
A quick reminder that we’ve been here before.
Mind you, even Justin made the same error just a couple of days ago:
It is quite hard to exactly pinpoint the source of this image, as it’s been used on thousands of websites. But it was being used on them as far back as 2017, so I think we can assume that the jaguar in question wasn’t diving into the Amazon to escape a fire last week. Unless it was a time-travelling jaguar, in which case surely there would be a much easier escape route for it.
We should also note that wild jaguars are very good swimmers, and would likely rather eat a human than give it a hug.
The thing is that now, every item of news has to be assumed to be fake and double-checked, and it’s exhausting. We’re (quite reasonably) losing all confidence in our news outlets and what we read on Facebook and Twitter, and while it’s good that we are questioning what we read, it does leave us with the problem of exactly where we do get genuine, verified information from? (And I’m talking factually here, never mind the bias that is then flung into the mix as well.)
There’s going to be a backlash, and we’re getting closer to it every day. It might not be pretty, but neither is the current situation. The lack of trust builds barriers, prevents reasonable communication and further isolates individuals inside their own convenient echo chambers.
It stifles progress and we lose sight of any mutually beneficial common goal. Like preventing the (still) impending death of the planet.
If that is something that you choose to believe is actually a genuine phenomenon, of course.
