Sources in a World of Information by Sean Fenley

by Sean Fenley
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
The Anything and Everything
December 6, 2011

“It’s amazing how much the Internet has changed our lives. People get emails that make accusations without foundation and they are circulated around the country within seconds and suddenly become topics of conversations around water coolers or in lunchrooms.” – Tim Russert

“There’s a lot of information being shared on the Internet now, very credible and good information that a lot more people are listening to that’s weakening the positions of governments around the world. So who knows how long we [will] have with the Internet.” – Michael C. Ruppert

The old days of the “valid” sources of the New York Times or the BBC, or Reuters, etc., are all but dead and gone. In recent years we’ve seen the Western media erroneously report on the Georgia-Russia War, they buried the story of a massive protest in Libya (on July 1st), and just recently Russia’s escalating military presence — in the impending Syrian tumult and destabilization — was barely reported in the Western press. Probably, the Western media was always essentially “in the bag” to institutions like the US State Department, NATO, the Western intelligence services, and the Pentagon (and not objective at all), but the Internet has opened up a world of non-Western and/or other alternative sources — all readily available to us — at the click of a mouse. In yesteryear sources that some may have instinctively, or reactively dismissed as propaganda or disinformation; I would argue, need to currently be looked at, with a much closer watch.

Since, in our “brave new world”, we’ve now become more sophisticated and learned to know, of the essential unattainability of an objective journalistic process, then we can look at the world — and the periodicals, texts and reporters through which we interpret it — as if we are no longer (at all) like a fish out of a pond. We know, as a basic precept, that an agenda hides out behind the written missive, and that the truth is not bottled or packaged, like fine wine or brandy, to be readily, facilely, heartily and easily observed.

Verily, there are still great fountains (and indeed reservoirs) of misinformation that can be stumbled upon out there in cyberspace, but it is only by lurking in these spaces of all gray — and/or some, no, or little stability — that, indeed, the answers that we are looking for can be found. Beyond trial and error (and you live, you learn), it can be difficult to thoroughly explain what should be the truthseeker’s methods, but it is only through the process of discovery — that the exact methods can be apprehended, attained and be known.

Methods in the war of information, or the battle of the “propagandas”, or what some like to ridicule as the “conspiracy view”; all to come to a higher synthesis/knowing, that one can actually tangibly and intuitionally recognize. And it is through this standard — that is not quite, of course, the same as splitting the atom — that serious inquiry can be rigorously and assiduously actualized. Though it may be distasteful to some, who would rather cloister themselves off, into comfortable little worldviews, ideologies, dogmas, paradigms or boxes; I fail to see what, one can glean by taking such a quaint, conservative, unsophisticated, and imperceptive approach. Certainly, to be one who is of the “utmost respect” and esteem to one’s peers and colleagues, is one who is unfaithful — to that which is sacrosanct — which is, of course, the truth.

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Sean Fenley is an independent progressive who would like to see some sanity brought to the creation and implementation of current, and future U.S. military, economic, foreign and domestic policies. He has been published by a number of websites, and publications throughout the alternative media.

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