Moving Beyond the Sound Bite

Interestingly enough, some readers question the tagline of my blog "For Those Who Choose to Move Beyond The Sound Bite." I'm often asked, what do I mean by that?

Moving beyond the sound bite is one's ability to gather information; triangulate it; and make an informed decision compared with what far too many of us do which is to take tiny snippets of information fed to us by the 4:00, 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 10:00, and 11:00 news. Moving beyond the sound bite is giving some real thought to what is being said or reported and asking questions such as, does that make sense? Could it really have happened that way? Is there another way that it could have happened? Is this even true? Sound bites don't really allow one to do that. It seems we are so eager to readily accept anything the media feeds to us without question. We busily go along our way accepting what is reported as the gospel without any further investigation.

This is one of the major issues conspiracy theorists have with the general mass of the population. To this day the Zapruder film of the Kennedy Assassination is dismissed because we are so ready to believe that a crazed lone gunman was able to assassinate a U.S. President with all of the secret service security agents around. That's what was told to us; that's what we believed and in many instances still believe. The same thing applies for the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A crazed lone gunman killed him as well. No questions. That's what Walter Cronkite said, so it must be true. This is not to say that it is not true, the point is we are not willing to conduct any further research to verify if it is true or not. Is it possible there was more than one shot fired on both those fateful days in November of 1963 and April of 1968? Could they both have been conspiracies? Maybe. Maybe not. The question is are we willing to move beyond the sound bites that are fed to us? These are just two prime examples of Americans believing what the government and the media would have us believe without question. How about 9/11? The War on Iraq? The Health Care Bill?

Moving beyond the sound bite is just a matter of us critically thinking about issues and not just so easily accepting everything we are told. It requires research, reading, thinking and then formulating an opinion for ourselves. It is for this reason, I selected "For those who choose to move beyond the sound bite" as my tagline.