Knowledge of what our long gone elders were ignorant of might make us look down on them with pity. But these elders don’t deserve to be blamed for their ignorance any more than we deserve to be congratulated for our knowledge. We have easy access, even in spite of the growing censorship, to the knowledge of what is taking place. Their access compared to ours is like the difference between a plugged sink and a sponge full of holes. The CBC hasn’t been able to plug our access to what’s going on for twenty years now, thankfully.
Jed never did get burglarized like he had continually feared. The stick that he had readied never got to make its contact with one single bone, and probably got tossed out along with the money that he had stowed deep inside his mattress. But burglars of a different order made away with greater valuables than Jed ever had or hid. By sophistry; that is, by the use of mass media sorcery, he was robbed of truth and suspicion. If he had consumed news originating from a purer source—not from socialist ideologues and left-leaning activists, but candid journalists instead—he would have been informed of the ‘holy war’ as the cause of all the pandemonium in Beirut, and of the reason, too, of what Iran was on the verge of becoming. If he and the men of his generation had been made aware of this by the media, and had been made to fear multiculturalism, Canada might have remained as Canadian as Japan is Japanese. Having politics to some extent figured out, and knowing that religious Muslims were the effectual cause of the war in Beirut that was always on the news, he and they might have been prompted to grapple with the grand subject of religion, which subject naturally leads to only one reputable Book, compared to which all others err. Yes, a burglary of wide dimension and of great significance was committed against a whole generation before the internet opened up access to alternative media sources. People generally do not know that what is left out of an article is often more important than what is put into it, and that what is left out is often left out in order to deceive. Facts are often burglarized; and if the writer is cunning enough in his craft, the reader will not suspect it. His very suspicion will be burglarized also. How to consume news with suspicion, and to do so with success, is an ability that is probably not taught, not even in universities or in courses in journalism. It is not something that has been learned by the Jed Porters of the world, then—by men who never did more than a handful of years in grade school. Paying attention to the news is not the way to become informed unless the news is both factual and honestly delivered. If newspaper articles and news reports are calculated to mislead, the consumer of news has to know how to spot deceptive rhetoric. He has to know how to spot devious omissions, subtle additions, sly shades of meaning, framing of subject, and unintentional admissions. But even with the knowledge that a course in rhetoric would provide, the consumer needs, in order to figure things out, other sources for his news than what is manufactured by mass media. He has to have something reliable to compare mass media content with. If he hasn’t got it, and he turns on the six o’clock ‘news’ to find out the facts, he will be fooled instead of informed. Consequently, he may be tricked to receive what he should reject or to accept what he should be wary of. Corporate reporting is witchery; and we all, at some point in time, have been bewitched by the conjuration.
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