Posted on July 7, 2020
Oooh, boy, this is both necessary and hard!
July 7 is Tell the Truth Day, and honestly, honesty is very important. It's hard to make good decisions if you don't have the facts, so other people telling you the truth is crucial - and of course you telling THEM the truth is just as important.
Basically, the truth is important because facts and evidence are important.
The most important people to tell the truth are in three groups: leaders, reporters, and experts.
Political leaders and elected officials need to tell their citizens the truth about everything from dangers from a new virus to dangers from a foreign nation, from how tax money is being spent to how a new policy will affect the nation.
Religious leaders, principals, and corporation presidents - all the movers and shakers and deciders - should also be honest and trustworthy, if our societies are to be happy and functional. Reporters and journalists and broadcasters owe it to their readers, viewers, and listeners to dig for, expose, publish, and air the truth - and to find out and tell us if our leaders are being as honest as they should be! Of course medical experts and scientists and academics should all be telling the truths of their own fields.
So, how are we doing on the whole project of telling the truth?
I would say that, by and large, experts and scientists do tell the truth. Some have lied, of course - fudged data, spun results, buried data, sold out for $$$ - but the mechanisms that exist in science and academia tend to push toward the truth. For example, there is peer review of scientific articles, before they are published, and any published article that is later proven dishonest is formally retracted. Many times other scientists try to replicate experiments, and sooner or later experiments with procedural problems, falsified data, or improper conclusions are overturned.
 |
| Check with fact checkers and media bias raters to see if your usual news sources are biased or neutral, reliable or propaganda! |
There are mechanisms to keep reporters honest, too - other reporters or the general public pointing out errors or lies can damage the reputation of a newspaper or TV news broadcast, for example. However, these mechanisms require that people care about the truth, and the growth of niche media, social media, and extremely biased media sources all show us that some people really care more about hearing (reading/viewing) what they want to hear more than they care about hearing the truth!
 |
| It's time to focus on electing honest women and men, people of the U.S.! |
Same with elected officials. You'd think that lying to voters would be swiftly met with losing elections - but there are way too many people who are too easily fooled, or who gladly fool themselves...and so politicians and other governmental leaders are too seldom pushed to be more honest.
We can and must do better. Do your part, today, to both tell the truth and to insist on the truth from others.
Also on this date:
Plan ahead:
Check out my Pinterest boards for:
And here are my Pinterest boards for:
No comments:
Post a Comment