If the information through which we get the idea of truth and reality comes to us via our senses. How do we know that our senses are right? How do we know our senses are not cheating us? That´s simple: BECAUSE THE NEW YORK TIMES SAID SO!!
Page One (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787777/), makes the case of the New York Times truth; we have correspondents all over the world, we have the best journalists, editors and managers; we have what, small news, websites, bloggers or twitters don´t have; the practice of professional journalism.
So, even if the news delivered by paper are dying, we can compete in the web and social networks, because journalism is still alive and though we no longer have the monopoly that paper, newspaper gave us, we are reinventing journalism in the web. In short, the aggregation of opinions through tweets, blogs or Facebook lacks the sources, the rigor and the vision that NYT journalism has.
Well, so far they´re right, however Page One doesn´t address the real issue here, are the NYT telling the truth? The kind of consent they´re helping to manufacture is based on democratic values or in special interest they have served in the past?
The question remains because nobody questions NYT professionalism but the interest they serve.
Page One says almost nothing about Carlos Slim´s investment in NYT, just a few seconds and gives no real answers to the Judith Miller´s reports on WMD in Iraq despite the fact that ambassador Wilson wrote a piece in the same paper explaining there wasn´t the possibility of WMD in Iraq.
Consent is manufactured through the information we have, which is transformed in perception and then in decisions and actions, therefore let us read with a bit of a critic doubt the truths and facts the NYT professional journalists published, and let us read the blogs, the tweets and the social networks as a way to create checks and balances to diminish the power of the old all powerful journalism, which despite its information apparatus knowingly not always, have said the truth.
I´ll keep reading NYT, cause it´s the best, but I´ll keep reading other sources and seeing other things to manufacture my vision of the world. Rene Descartes perhaps would smile thinking... "methodic doubts"
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