10 Insane Ways the Online Media Is Lying To You

Right now, you have more information at your fingertips than 99 percent of history’s scholars. With a swipe of your finger, you can wire yourself into thousands of unfolding news stories, read books written centuries ago, or keep up to date with the latest scientific findings. Not just you, but everyone reading this and billions of other people, too. It’s learning on an unprecedented scale.
Or it would be if the Internet didn’t excel at spreading nonsense. As you read this, hundreds of websites are making millions of dollars reprinting absurd, damaging, and confusing lies, adding to the overall dumbness in the world. Here’s how.

http://listverse.com/2015/07/26/10-i...-lying-to-you/

My favorite was The Well to Hell hoax [[Russian deep drillers breaking through into Hell).

I never fell for it but at the time it sure sounded like reporters were taking it as fact.

[[Oops. Cited Wikipedia. That can't be good.)

It's bad enough internet usage has made us more dumbererer :p with our inability to concentrate or develop better reading comprehension habits [[I blame brevity-yes, that's it, that's the ticket-brevity) because of our attention-addled manner of skimming things [[read "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr), but it does deliberately play into our own susceptibilities [[or self-suggestible way we want to believe things-Remember when everyone wanted to believe that pig saved that goat in the water back int 2012?) to falsehood. We are finding the internet to be this nebulous, unregulated thing that panders to hideously popular pap results when doing searches and giving far too much space to extreme views that each hold a selective bias in all they report.

Than again, it begs the question was there ever a standard of integrity and a fair and inclusive balance in reporting being upheld in any recorded sources throughout time [[certainly not during the reign of many Communist regimes-you had to have a license even to own a typewriter in Romania-or during the reign of Nazi-dominated Europe)? I find many discrepancies between older sources and editions versus updated ones, and this is something I've noticed for well over twenty years. It's like how news sources [[and archives) were diluted and trimmed down through each channel they passed in Orwell's "1984".

Of course, I'm just preaching to the choir, here. It's obvious why many professors and teachers will not accept Wikipedia as a source [[didn't Colbert get folks to tamper with the listings on the endangered state of African elephants?); doesn't stop it from dropping a few clues my direction that send me on wondrous tangents of info. gathering. However, I can name many times I read a specific item or witnessed something personally, and due to it's nature that defames an influential person [[or something far more conspiratorial), I found the access to information on line lacking or dwindling with time [[ie. things on John DupPont, Joel Olsteen's wife being racist to an airline stewardess, Charles Stanley,or those blue triangles that appeared in the Cass Corridor after 9/11). So, You can count me as part of the 98%http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1686242.html Also, I don't trust any image I see online, either. I'll stick to my books.

Take how you want from this articlehttps://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...-manipulation/