Te following may be a series of lies, contain falsehoods or be complete bullshit:
My friend Ryan once gave me a card with this saying from the Buddha: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
Obviously, there’s an inherent contradiction with the statement. Ryan said he gave it to me because I often question the “lines I’m being fed” — whether it’s by the corporate media, religion, my friends, the Left or the Right (which isn’t exactly true because I tend to believe the Left more than the Right — I’m liberal, sorry).
But yes, I do tend to be skeptical of what people tell me because people could lie to you about anything at anytime and you probably wouldn’t even know it. I could be lying to you right now and not even have a friend named Ryan. But I’m not — and you’re probably taking my word for it because I wrote it and it’s printed in The Daily, therefore it must be true. God knows the media never makes mistakes or lies to you about anything.
Last week, my column on Che Guevara had a factual error in it. Che was not on the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s debut album as I stated (a Tibetan monk on fire was), but was instead on Rage’s first single “Bombtrack.” The mistake was a stupid one, I’m sorry it was printed, but it proves that not everything the media tells you is necessarily true.
Medill students are taught to give unbiased, objective accounts of any news story. And though we strive toward this goal, inevitably there will be a slight prejudice one way or another. There are omissions in every story since it’s next to impossible to include every single fact of every single story into every single article. Journalists pick and choose which facts they deem are the most important. Therefore consumers do not get the entire truth because the information in a paper, on the news or in a magazine is the information we almighty journalists — today’s record keepers — see as “fit to print.”
The same goes for op-ed pieces. Last week I didn’t tell you that Che was a man who executed people during his revolutionary fight. He was a man who murdered those he saw as counterrevolutionaries and people he thought were Batista government collaborators. I didn’t mention that because I only have so much space per column and can’t really fit everything I want to say, or everything that should be said, in the maximum 600 words. I decided to tell you the information I thought was the most relative in making the point of my column — that Che, along with anything revolutionary, are now commodities.
Because I pick and chose what facts to include in the column, you only got my side of what Che was all about. If you’re interested in the other side, look him up and do what the Buddha said and use your own reason and common sense to draw your own conclusion.
But really, why should you believe anything I have to say? Why should you believe anything anyone has to say? Try reading James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Book Got Wrong. As for my columns, I just spew out whatever I want to talk about and try to back it up with information I have and research I’ve done. Who am I to tell you anything? Oh right … I’m a journalist.
