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I just saw Ben Stein’s recent film, “Expelled”.  It is a documentary that makes several arguments for the possibility of Intelligent Design.  It also exposes some conspiracy theories about the scientific establishment’s suppression of research in the area of intelligent design.  I found the film very interesting.  The arguments it made were very convincing, and Stein gave some new perspectives on the possibility of ID that I had never considered.  The thing that I probably found most interesting about the film was the mode of delivery.  The film was presented in a separatist manner usually dominated by the left, and to be honest had a very “Michael Moore” feel about it.  I highly recommend this movie to anyone who wants to hear an intelligent discussion about the creation of life on earth.

http://www.expelledthemovie.com/

I had an interesting discussion with one of my professors the other day that I thought I would share.  I am a self proclaimed “News Junkie”, rabidly gathering news about anything from any source I can like an addict running free in a methadone clinic.  I learned early in my media consumption that there are essentially two types of news sources: Sources that claim neutrality (mostly mainstream) and those that do not (blogs, opinions, etc.).  I find value in news from both types, but an important part of processing news is having an appropriate context with which to frame it.

Therefore, the problem lies with those news sources that claim neutrality but in fact have hidden agendas.  They are obviously not neutral, and in my opinion depart further from neutrality every day.  The “We report, you decide” tagline is almost a parody.  Even my beloved NPR has an obvious agenda.  In fact, when I check my RSS feeds in the morning I routinely read the same story from 3 or 4 different news sources in order to get a proper view of what actually happened.

I don’t mind this process, because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to form my own opinion and not have it subliminally dictated to me based on a corporate agenda.  I’m sure it’s my own naiveté that makes me want to believe there was ever a time when news sources didn’t have hidden agendas, but I also think that human nature innately wants to be able trust.

Having said all of that, I actually think that the public today has a greater opportunity to find truth in the news media than it ever has.  In the past, there were a limited number of news sources, so if they had an agenda you didn’t have a great chance of figuring it out.  Now we have so many different points of view that if you can filter through the opinions, you can actually get a better view of what’s going on.

This is where my professor disagrees with me.  His theory is that mainstream news sources are so far removed from the truth, and have such different ontological perspectives attached to their agendas that no truth can be found in them.

What do you think?  I’d love to hear another perspective.

I’m not sure I ever showed it here, but the “Media Center” project I did for USANA has been up for a while and seems to be working well. It was a great project for me because of the sole ownership I was given over it. I got to do everything from conception to code to design to completion, which doesn’t happen very much in the design world. Anyways, here is the link if you are interested. And I’m starting on V2 in a couple of weeks

https://www.usana.com/dotCom/mediaCenter/video