Why One Should Distrust the News
An article by the BBC on “The world’s most nutritious foods" ranks the healthfulness of foods on the basis of an article at the supposedly scientific PLOSone journal, titled "Uncovering the Nutritional Landscape of Food”. That study is based on a dataset that entirely ignores antioxidant-content of foods. Antioxidant-content has come to be recognized during recent decades to be perhaps the most important factor in nutrition. It’s even more important than vitamin-content and than mineral-content and than protein, carbohydrate, and fat content. So, the basis upon which the article’s ranking was done is the factors that were known about in, say, 1950, to be important, but that are now known to be far less determinative of a person’s health and longevity than are foods’ anti-oxidant contents. Neither the article nor its underlying dataset even so much as just mentions “oxidant” anywhere. The authors of the BBC and PLOSone articles and of the underlying dataset were apparently entirely ignorant of the findings in nutritional research during the past 60+ years — findings about antioxidants, which have transformed our understanding of nutrition.
This is not unusual.
(Incidentally, “ORAC Values: Antioxidant Values of Foods & Beverages" is a ranking of foods on the basis of antioxidant-contents, as measured by ORAC; and this is actually a far more accurate indicator of the healthfulness of foods than is the ridiculous BBC-PLOSone ranking — but far fewer people are being exposed to it.)
Here’s another example of the untrustworthiness of news-media and of other allegedly nonfiction presentations, even in many ‘scientific’ journals — but this will be an example in what has become overwhelmingly the world’s leading encyclopedia: Wikipedia. The CIA-edited and -written Wikipedia writes about the anti-CIA Michel Chossudovsky, by saying against his organization, the Centre for Research on Globalization, that it “promotes a variety of conspiracy theories and falsehoods.[7][19][8][20][21][22][23].” However (just to take one example), footnote 22 there leads to a lying 11 September 2013 article in the neoconservative The New Republic. This TNR article says against the progressive organization Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) that “The sources for VIPS' most sensational claims, it turns out, are Canadian eccentric Michel Chossudovsky’s conspiracy site Global Research and far-right shock-jock Alex Jones’s Infowars.” Wikipedia’s citing that link is merely assuming that everything at both of those ‘conspiracy’ sites (the leftist Chossudovsky’s and the rightist Jones’s) is false (in other words: Wikipedia there is blatantly deceiving its readers, and is even assuming that they are stupid enough to believe such a ridiculous thing as that), and is also assuming that the Obama regime was truthful when saying that Bashar al-Assad was behind the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack in Ghouta Syria. However, that second assumption there is also demonstrably false. The TNR’s article and its allegation against Assad regarding Ghouta were, in fact, disproven, on 14 January 2014, when leading US weapons-scientists Theodore Postol and Richard Lloyd studied closely all the evidence on that event and the US Government’s evidence that Assad had been associated with causing it, and the Lloyd-Postol finding was unequivocal that “the US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” Furthermore, Obama actually knew that he was falsifying. Seymour Hersh’s 17 April 2014 article in the London Review of Books, proved this. Obama was lying. Neither Lloyd-Postol nor Hersh is even referred to in today’s Wikipedia’s article. It still trusts Obama’s and TNR's proven lie that Assad (instead of Obama’s ‘Syrian rebels’) had done that sarin attack. Wikipedia smears Chossudovsky with that lie, by simply reasserting the lie, and by assuming that Chossudovsky’s site is less trustworthy than Wikipedia (which is yet another lie). But that’s merely one of many lies that are in the Wikipedia article against Chossudovsky.
Intelligent skeptics dig down like this, and routinely find that there’s a very selective use of ‘evidence’ that’s behind most claims, and that the reality is that the ‘news’ is often false, and, worse than that, the ‘news’ is usually false for a purpose or purposes — that the ’news' is fraudulent, that it is propaganda, PR, instead of being honest research and reporting such as it claims. Usually, it’s false because the intention is to deceive, not because Wikipedia (or whatever news-and-public-affairs medium one happens to be considering) merely goofed.
Extremely wealthy people buy, advertise their corporations in, and/or donate to, public-affairs media, not in order to profit from them as owners of them, so much as in order to influence public affairs by means of them. This is one of the ways in which to grab hold not only of the government, but even of the people who vote for the government and who also buy those billionaires’ corporations’ products and services.
Trust should never be given; it should only be earned. Regarding what is public, trust is earned only rarely — and is never earned when that trust is in the major ‘news’-media (all of which are owned and controlled by billionaires and centi-millionaires who actually have interests in many corporations, including some they don’t control but only serve or else invest in). The major ‘news’-media don’t always lie, but they often lie — especially about foreign affairs, which are the main focus of international corporations.
posted by Satish Sharma at
16:53
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