Are people boycotting the right places?

SFC Collin McMillion — Sat, 23 Jun 2018 22:05:18 -0400

Are people boycotting the right places? Rather than boycott stores and businesses, why don't we boycott the media? Seem to me that most of the problems we have to deal with are blown completely out of proportion by the media just to make problems appear to be worse than they really are or to start a social circus. People who work for the media get paid big bucks just to create problems that way too many people accept as fact. If something happens thousands, so even hundreds of miles from you, why do you jus just accept some reporter's word that it is the absolute truth. We were not there to witness what happened or how it happened, so why believe someone try to make the front page and bigger money?

Response by SGT Private RallyPoint Member made Jun 23 at 2018 10:26 PM

SGT Private RallyPoint Member — Sat, 23 Jun 2018 22:26:17 -0400

SFC Collin McMillion - Negative. The media is a resource, just like any other source of information. The library, the internet, Ol’ drunk Earl at the bar, etc. It’s just a source of information. Boycotting the media is about as useful or helpful as boycotting the library. Why take a tool out of your toolbox?

Your definitive statements about the media...“People who work for the media get paid big bucks just to create problems that way too many people accept as fact”...well that’s not entirely or always true. PBS isn’t full of rabble rousers, for example. It’s a good thing I didn’t take your definitive statements as factual.

I understand your point, but I think a better point would be for to people to learn to better utilize mass media. Treat it as a tool. Treat it as another source of information. Between the media, and the library and even Ol’ drunk Earl at the bar, then each person can make up their own mind.

But being willfully ignorant due to a boycott of information is just as bad as being inadvertently ignorant due to lazily processing information and not rationally and thoroughly thinking things through.

Imagine if 200 years ago, before the spread of real mass media, imagine if people were like, “forget all these fancy books and newspapers. I’ve never even MET the writers. What do they know?”