In the early 1970's I lived in Australia. After a long period of time, we were exploring coming back home. However, we were concerned by our Melbourne newspaper (remember those?) reporting gunfire on the American streets and how unsafe everything was.
In the end we came home during an adventure across the South Pacific and discovered again that media rarely in the modern world presents a factual picture of what is happening.
There is a huge bias in every piece of writing. It slants the article we are reading or the news video we are watching. Add to that the amount of free information that is present on the internet and all social media and it is easy to see why we live in a continued state of overwhelm. Everything must be taken with a grain of sand. Nothing is as it seems.
Our job is to continually slow down and let information flow instead of trying to take everything in all at once. It is looking at both sides of all information.
I have a favorite question when I am inundated with loads of 'stuff'. It is "what must the writer/producer/leader of this believe about the world in order to produce this piece of news?"
My favorite example of this is the story of the man who robbed the convenience store in Los Angeles. The description of the fleeing man was that he was last seen rolling over the hill on the sidewalk in his wheelchair! Stop and think of the thought process that produces a man's decision to rob a store and then truly believe he can escape in his wheelchair. I rest my case about perception.........
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