Saturday, October 13, 2007

An Inconvenient Truth or Untruth?

It was highlighted in today news that a British judge has ruled that the award-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth” by former US Vice President Al Gore had presented some misleading facts and figures on global warming.

The whole world seemed to be lapping up what Al Gore had presented in his documentary and took in completely the veracity of the facts outlined in his documentary.

This brought to the point of the important role that mass media plays everyday in our lives. Many of the people has assumed that information purveyed by media are not error-free and fail to distinguish fact and fiction, opinions and facts.

Statistics, bar chars, and other graphic tools used to present information are often impressive enough and it can look quite convincing to readers and audiences. One must be discerning enough to analyze the source of the data, the means of gathering the data, and whether the data presented are one-sided and without bias.

In this age of information, technology and knowledge era, where information and knowledge spreads at the speed of lightning, the spread of distorted information will spread in a matter of seconds to affect and influence many.

For example, Terrorism leverages on technology today to spread its twisted ideologies far and apart, which can easily influence many who do not have the faculty to analyze this information and who are easily coaxed into taking up the warped ideologies.

The spread of inaccurate, biased ideas and information in this information age can have immense ramifications.

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