People are given a choice of which news they want to subject themselves too, because they are bombarded with mass media and somehow have to sort through all of it. People are not, however, given a choice of which reality they believe in. We are all choosing what media outlets we trust, and thus what reality we trust to be broadcast to us. We must selectively consume media out of necessity, but we perceive one single reality in the media we keep track of. Farhood Majoo's True Enough explains that the more people “trust those who are like themselves… the more they distrust strangers” (226). The more we trust our selected outlets to bring news to us, the less we trust sources that are less agreeable to our own search for facts. The more we trust our selected outlets for news, the more we unconsciously trust them to bring our reality to us, as well.
News has come to depend on a kind of deception, in that it relies on our “prior connections” (228). Our biases cannot be undone, but we are not necessarily conscious of them to the extent that we can actively choose news that confirms our beliefs. News, like marketers today, wants to “sell to you without appearing to sell” (202). News wants to appeal to its niche of customers, but without revealing their hand. They are aware of the existence of a niche group. They know that you belong to the niche group, but that you are most likely unaware that you are in a group based upon some common system of beliefs on certain subjects. In such a fashion, mass media has conceivably “mastered a new way to lie” (193). Our news is actually lying to us, and we do not even seem to mind. By utilizing personal biases, and the need to sort through the abundance of available information, so-called “propagandists” can manufacture a reality through which people process information. News creates its own reality without informing its audience that they are actively “engaged in persuasion” (192). We are unaware that our own notions are persuading us to choose certain media, and we are also unaware that our media is persuading us, in turn. We are in a cycle of reconfirmation. I have a notion of what I desire to be true. Whether I am consciously aware of that desire does not affect the fact the lacks of disconnect between desired reality and reality. What we perceive is our reality. We cannot “see” things that our personal bias has not programmed us to be aware of. We claim to crave objective news, but we are really on the hunt for stories that “corroborate [our] point of view” (150). The so-called “real” news that we want is the news slanted in such a way that we find it favorable to our own beliefs. We already choose sources that attempt to do this for us. The bias we see in the news “isn’t strategic. It’s real. It’s real to us, at least, and that’s as real as it gets” (158). Our perception of news is our perception of reality, and our perception of reality is the only reality that we know. We cannot remove ourselves from our own reality in search of an Archimedean Point from which to regard everything completely objectively. We assume that our own views are already “essentially objective” (155). We consider ourselves essentially objective. By choosing the news sources that we do, we perceive ourselves as unbiased, and thus the sources that we keep up with are unbiased, also, as they are in line with our own perceived objective views.
The lens through which we see the world transfers over to the information that we ingest. So although the news might be lying to us, it is just as real as we can perceive it. True Enough makes me think that I am only a victim of the news that I subject myself to.
