Monday, July 28, 2008

Fact: Koolaid Causes Anxiety

Few things bother me as much as the media. I rarely make it through the day without slamming my head on the desk. Sometimes I feel like I'm the crazy one. Like I'm at a rally yelling, "can none of you see through his lies!", while the crowd stares at me in an uncomfortable silence.

One of the tricks reporters use is to skew the facts and statistics to unfairly support their story. Sure, most school shooters may play violent video games, but you can't stop at that fact. Frogger is long gone. A teenage boy is either playing GTA or Jigglypuff's Flowerland Adventure, and you would rather they own the former.

That kind of thing always annoyed me in school. I had consistently been told that it's a statistical fact that students who sit up front get better grades:
Sit In Back --> Bad Grades

There is a much easier reality to the statistics that doesn't require any kind of complicated theory:
Sit In Back <-- Don't Care --> Bad Grades

I'm not sure if reporting has ever been honest. There is always a romanticized notion that everything was better in the past. News has changed drastically though. The local newspaper or nightly news is no longer the only source of information. With so many reports bombarding us through cable news and the internet, it's hard to tell who's lying anymore.

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