Fact versus Fiction

I have been listening with great interest to the CBC Ideas program on How To Think About Science। I am tired of the Man in the Street interviews in which fiction is taken as fact and misinformation presented and held up as reality. This kind of information is delivered to an acquiescent public. How knowledge is produced, designed in social context, presented by mass markets, is not necessarily for scientific purposes. Even breast cancer websites are risk for the average consumer.

We know that social and economic interests shape research topics, methods and have bias, including ‘scientific’ research। Results are delivered to a public that does not examine it for accuracy. We believe a lot of what we see and read. Media owes a great responsibility to informing the public in a way that presents information, not heresay.

Reliability and validity are not buzzwords for any politicians I know. Nor do they factor into much of that which we read online. We know, too, that the Americans shape Canadian policies, or try to. Homeland Security has continued to direct Canadian transportation policy and procedures. I follow, with great interest, the Fair Copyright for Canada.

We must be vigilant and remain firm in our convictions. In Canada the geopolitical climate differs from that of the United States (Gwyn, 1995), and does not include the traditional ‘right to bear arms’, or ‘rugged individualism’, rampant in some areas of the country, with heavy-handed applications of either the Quran or the Bible affecting the values of business and government agencies and NGOs.

Canadian viewpoints must be presented in the Global Village. We think and act differently. That said, many of those who conduct interviews on some of my favourite media stations, tend to miss out the p oint of the interview. They like to talk explore issues about how a person ‘feels’ about an horrific event and talk around the topic. With no new information, the topic is pursued with the vigour of a dog and a bone. Some much presented as news is simply a reaction to news already broadcast. Is there nothing going on in the world that we must examine how one feels after losing a family member, or their house to disaster?