It’s an old cliché, but it sticks really well:

 “Things are not as they seem.”

The news – and I hope this doesn’t come as news to you – is not gospel. Every news network, whether privately owned or publically, does not – and in fairness, probably cannot – present you with the definitive truth (that would imply perfect knowledge and objectivity). So what we get is ultimately a combination of a particular news provider’s reach (the breadth and depth of the sources it has), quality (degree of professionalism in presentation) and its particular editorial point of view (the prevailing political stance or worldview of the editors responsible for “making the news”). Each of these will “shape” the news that you receive. You might wonder what the quality aspect has to do with it specifically: There is something about a professional presentation that causes people to lend the content more legitimacy and credibility than it perhaps deserves (and the converse is unfortunately also true). At first I thought this might be a tendency more prevalent in Gen X’ers, who grew up surrounded by TV, but if we’re honest with ourselves, our default setting is to judge a book by its cover. The bottom line, when you consider all these factors, is that what we “receive” at the end of the day might not be much like what happened at all.

At this point it is important to distinguish between the “skewing” of news that happens because of the imperfect nature of human beings (distortion), versus the deliberate “skewing” with malicious intent (deception). News, after all, is also a means of controlling people. I find it odd that for all the coverage given to Hitler’s atrocities, few people realise that he was one of the most effective manipulators of mass media – including news – to control a nation. To think that such deception/manipulation through mass media ended (or even abated) with the defeat of Nazi Germany is naïve to the extreme. News feeds our fears, directs our opinions and helps establish our world view.  It is a powerful tool that has mostly resided in the hands of a few. Again, it’s naïve to think that the intention of the “news creators” is to bring us “the truth”. We’ve lost sight of the fact that despite there being more news outlets than ever before, these are probably owned by a smaller group of people than ever before, due to the on-going mergers and acquisitions in that sector (admittedly I don’t have the stats to back this statement up, but reading Rupert Murdoch’s biography is very insightful).

The bottom line is that no single news provider can be trusted to bring you objective news coverage. Wisdomhub endeavours to take the controlled mainstream news and apply a “corrective” filter which hopefully brings us a little closer to what is actually happening. It serves as an aggregator with commentary, so what you will find here is:

  1. Obscure news that reveals something about what’s “actually” happening in the headlines
  2. Highlights of news within news that would normally be glossed over in the middle paragraph but could be more important than the headlines
  3. Commentary that is not politically correct / pandering to a lobby group / driven by a hidden agenda / commercially motivated

Note that I’m not creating or writing news here – I’m only referencing existing news, highlighting the bits that are relevant and comment on it where appropriate. Some of this news could be years old, some of it might be breaking as you read. Either way, you should probably know about it.