Do any of us really know the truth?

Each of us, every single one, gets his or her information from some form of mass media. Here's an intersting piece on a report aired over several days on CNN: http://newsbusters.org/node/6552. Apparently Hezbollah had such firm control over journalists in the area at the time it was only later than the journalist (CNN's Nick Robertson) could "come clean".

Challenged by Reliable Sources host (and Washington Post media writer) Howard Kurtz on Sunday, Robertson suggested Hezbollah has “very, very sophisticated and slick media operations,” that the terrorist group “had control of the situation. They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn't have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath,” and he even contradicted Hezbollah’s self-serving spin: “There's no doubt that the [Israeli] bombs there are hitting Hezbollah facilities.”

On Monday, July 24th Nick Robertson delivered another piece on Hezbollah activities. This time, he didn't report what they wanted him to. Instead, he reported on their efforts to manipulate the media. Apparently, Hezbollah had lined up several (a dozen or so) ambulances in front of a hospital and called the news media. One by one the ambulance drivers were instructed to turn on their sirens and drive around the block while the media filmed them "rushing off to save the wounded". Hooray for Hezbollah.

Manipulating the media for domestic consumption is nothing new. Hitler did it with great success (afterall, his party did control the media). The Communist Party in the former Soviet Union did it nearly as well for far longer. Milosevic did it in Yugoslavia to gain control of the country in a reasonably infamous incident. He staged an attack on Serbs at a polling place by Albanians of all people (in reality his own party cronies) and rallied his supporters to fend them off declaring, "nobody should even try to beat you". You can read a bit about it here: http://www.famainternational.com/mirror/smcontent.htm.

It is now known that nothing was either accidental or spontaneous about his visit to Kosovo Polje, the BBC reporters who made the series about the collapse of Yugoslavia had also noticed it. Everything was arranged, staged and orchestrated there: the behavior of the Serbs, the incidents with the Albanians...

There's a difference between spin and the out and out staging of events which would not have otherwise occurred.

Each of us needs to be responsible in our consumption of mass media. We need to be media literate. We need to understand that certain outlets have an interest in telling us one story over another. We need to take in information from a diverse set of sources and question everything we take in.

We also need to understand, none of us will ever know the whole truth about anything. FAR too may people in this world are CONVINCED they are right and everyone else is stupid.