Crises of credibility/WMD

It is my hope that this will be a relatively short post. When consuming my daily dose of media, I'm considering an issue that troubles me greatly, and this is that the representation or just plain raw data available to administrators and the public. This can be seen in the case of faulty intelligence regarding WMD, media staging of the Jessica Lynch rescue, and the apparent fabrication from the Georgia representative that she accused GW of knowing beforehand of 9/11.

Although the instances I cite deal with many different terms, they present the issue of credibility all the way from the government to the Fourth Estate. For example, if the press is not ethically driven to uncover the facts, or if governmental powers seek to shield and distort facts as not seen for many years, or if the source information is overtly faulty in the first place, the idea of factual communication becomes increasingly subjective. This is not to say that in any communication does not have its biases, but the end result in my scenario is that two factors come to bear in the construction of credibility.

These are:
1: the ability to use the media more effectively than others, and
2: the ability to repeat the message more than any other organ, thus reinforcing the appearance of its credibility.

This becomes an orobouros in which the concept of the 'fact' becomes increasingly subjective, and the organs of 'factual' transmission become increasingly opaque, leaving little ability for the individual to discern verifiable information from propaganda., or bias from same.

My problem becomes in the way organs such as the Experimental Party is able to comment upon our civil society if the information which is known only to a select few is fatally flawed by the time it gets to the reader. Therefore, the foundations of what is being discussed becomes very 'fluid' and the nature of what constitutes factual representation becomes highly problematic.

However, resources such as the Internet still offer sufficient ways for the seeker to find enough points of view in which a sort of baseline of truth can be determined and thus a fairly objective standpoint can be determined.

However, most individuals are being increasingly stretched by obligations intrinsic to contemporay society, and this lessens the ability to read and inform one's self and necessitating the need for reliance on often flawed soundbytes. I believe that what you might see here is another form of mass media control, and I will not quite go as far as invoking the pop cultural mem of 'The Matrix', but my point is that in many cases the masses are being increasingly forced to rely on media sources that are more and more subjective in their acquisition and presentation of 'the facts'.

Of course this is a form of mass control, and an issue I need to ponder more before commenting further.

-patrick