Michael Crichton's Speech: information or misinformation

We were watching on the IS101 class a panel where Michael Crichton participated, by the time that he was releasing his book State of Fear. Crichton talked about how the media makes us believe that some events in history were worse or not that worse than they really were. He pointed out the effect that this misinformation may bring negatives effects to society. He referred to the catastrophe of Chernobyl as an example of how different newspapers and studies showed different statistic related to the damages of this accident and he suggested that the magnification of the catastrophe led to  consequences like the decrease in the optimism and self-expectations of the people in Chernobyl. Then he applied that same idea to the environmental field. What would be the effect of not having the accurate information regarding the global warming? Just because scientists support global warming, does that means that is necessarily going to happen? What if yes? What if no?

I think that Dr. Crichton´s speech was a good example of the critical point of view that we all need to have in our lives.  We need to learn to be skeptic when we read the journal front pages or see the CNN or Fox News, knowing that their information may not be real and that they can be a tool that people in power use to manipulate the ideas of the population.

So what can we believe on? I am convinced that when something happen the first information released is the less accurate. A modern example is the tragic event that occurred in Norway some months ago, where the reporter constantly changed the number of victims, at a certain point I remembered when I though the following: “See the power of media, fifty Norwegians died and that was one of the world´s most tragic events, but what about the people who died every die because of terrorism in the middle east, and by terrorism I don’t mean only Osama and their internal conflicts, but the terrorism generated by the US army, where with sources like Wikileaks we can have a small idea that how people is being killed”. We need to know that the information that we receive sometimes is not only intended to inform us, but misinform us, manipulate us.  We need to overcome that State of Fear generated by the media and before feeling terrified (if necessary) by something, be sure that we have looked for many different sources. Unfortunately even we tenf to believe that we in the era of the communication, reliable sources are just a few.