One of the reasons I stopped watching TV was the contradicting misinformation on the news. I would watch a story on the news and then watch a different channel and get a different slant on the same story. It started to aggravate me that I, the television watcher, was being manipulated and sometimes lied to by people that I used to count on to just give me the facts. When I would talk with some friends there would sometimes be different viewpoints of a particular incident, and some of my friends would go to their graves believing that what they heard on Fox News was absolutely true. A story in Scientific American supports my viewpoint of TV news.
"Why is it that once you learn something incorrectly (say, 7 X 9 = 65), it seems you never can correct your recall? Identifying, correcting and averting our memory errors are part of a cognitive process called memory monitoring. Incorrect associations can be tough to change, but we can use techniques to retrain our brain. Building on the correct information can help you learn new associations to it: add something to change how you retrieve the item from your memory."
So if a news station decides to fabricate or exaggerate a news story and people listen to the story and believe it is fact, then they tell their friends and neighbors the "true story", and on and on until it is believed by thousands of people, we end up with a brainwashed society.
It became more than aggravating to me to listen to fiction being sold as fact. I want to be told the truth, in my personal life, in my work life, in the news being fed to me. I decide what is good enough to chew and what to spit back out.
