Missing the Boat by Trusting Media Experts
Determining If the Quoted Gurus Are Really Worth Listening To
What do the “experts” really know? With smoke and mirrors, television audiences are led to believe that media-quoted experts are to be revered like ancient sages, when they are but technical specialists in areas that are decreasing as we speak, because the size of each specialty’s knowledge base is increasing astro- nomically. Even the smartest ‘experts’ cannot know everything, and some barely enough. Contradictions can arise even when independent technology experts use different terminology to describe the same things.
A single field, such as natural science, is composed of millions of microcosms whose ‘facts’ are changing at lightning speed. How could anyone but God know how they all relate and interact, and thus be privy to the sum of knowledge about them? Honest researchers will say readily that they are not only continually discovering new facts about old things, but old paradigms are failing daily and being replaced with volumes of new concepts, values, and assumptions based on new data.
Two opposing scientific views could both be right, if one camp or the other had incorporated an error in calculation or misinterpreted a result. Paradigm shifts occur when overwhelming evidence disproves one theory and supports another. But the line between arguments may still be a thin one. A perfect example is the long-assumed mainstream view of global warming disintegrating into global cooling with the discovery of withheld data and international special interests.
Proving the Point
It has often been said that ‘even the devil can quote scripture to achieve his own ends’. And so does the media. Wherever it is possible to take two sides, experts are drawn from universities and other ‘expert pools’ to prove a point. Wisdom dictates that parts of both arguments can be true, but then audiences drop the ball and let the media ‘experts’ decide what they should believe. Information is fed to the busy and the lazy. Perhaps it is time for Americans to become pro-active and chase down their own truths.
There is an often quoted Bible verse, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” Rarely is the truth of the verse itself disputed, but just about everything else is up for discussion. In a time when everyone is looking for the truth, and the experts are all claiming to have it, it’s no wonder that the world’s repository of research papers is growing at an astounding rate. And all this information dug up by investigators for the news wires is distilled down to the evening news – and there’s the rub. The distillation process is subjective.
Information For All
Nervous professionals and medical practitioners say “There’s a lot of false information on the Internet,” to prevent patients from using it to ask questions about failing traditional practices. But there's much bad information in libraries too. The difference is, it doesn’t get corrected at light speed like Internet information does. Today, everyone has information access, in newspaper archives and web sites like Fast Search and HighBeam, with and without subscription services or RSS feeds– it’s there.
Research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be placed on PubMed. Medline Plus contains the information from the National Library of Medicine. Typing “clinical journals” into a search engine brings up all journal publications from pharmacology and nutrition to microbiology and metabolism. Gertrude Stein (deceased 1946) said that “Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” This is no longer the information dark ages and people don’t have to believe the “experts” quoted on the news. Knowledge is now available to everyone, to find out whatever they desire from reputable sources, and most of those sources are now accessible on the Internet..
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