Bending the information

I was listening to my iPod the other day, and the song "Waiting on the World to Change," came up on my shuffle. There was a particular set of lines in the John Mayer song that really stuck with me. When Mayer sang, "And when you trust your television, what you get is what you got. Cause when they own the information, oh They can bend it all they want," I definitely saw a parallel to what we are learning in class. We discussed how the media plays what people want to hear, and that is why the wise man is always highlighted in different tales. People enjoy reading about a man who succeeded, and the media understands that. As a result of this, we have a clouded view of what is actually going on in the world. Whoever finds the information can portray the story to the public in whichever way they choose. They may leave huge bits of it out, and highlight one part of the topic. They may choose an angle that doesn't accurately correlate. Whatever they end up doing, the reader or listener sees whatever the news tells them. It is the viewers’ way of knowing national/international affairs. The news therefore determines their opinion on a situation they may not know much about.
We hear more about the hero, than the man who failed. We see soldiers saving people instead of killing them, and we watch our government usually doing the "right" thing. We see what we want to see. This perspective is bias, and doesn't tell the whole story. There are so many ideas and groups of people that are left out in broadcast. So as John Mayer says, we are just "Waiting on the World to Change."