If they say, it must be right

"They say it's better to water the lawn for one extended period as opposed to shorter, more frequent watering," I explained to my loving wife. 

"Okay," was her listless response. It was enough for her. She didn't even ask who they were. And after watering the lawn for an hour, not even I knew who they were anymore. I simply knew that they must be the authority on lawn watering. 

They say carries a lot of weight these days.  

Now some critical people, like myself, need a few more sources than they say. My wife understands this, so she'll often qualify her statements with: "I heard it on the CBC." She knows that the CBC is my they say. Because the CBC, as we know, is the word of God (at least on all things secular).  

I confess: I'm just as trusting as the rest of humankind. I can be easily swayed by what I read online or what I see on TV. When I do a Google search, I usually trust the first answer I get. And when I hear it on the CBC, I know it must be true. 

But this admission is not intended to discredit the value of real facts. They are still extremely important. When I'm choosing whether to vaccinate my child or not, I want real facts, not they say facts; not even the CBC may know for certain! I want a scientific consensus on the issue, not some celebrity's take on what may cause autism. 

The problem is, we are bombarded by so many alternative facts and views that it becomes difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is not. This can be dangerous. It's why there are new outbreaks of measles and rubella throughout North America. Maybe polio will make a comeback too. 

On a political level, the problems are equally concerning. Dictators rise to power by discrediting real news organizations and confusing the public with misinformation. They eventually become the only source of news, and if well-executed, can easily dupe their own citizens. 

We are all susceptible to being duped, but the recent distrust of the "mainstream media" is worrying. In a 2017 poll issued by the Economist, 45 percent of Republicans favoured permitting courts to shut down media organizations that are "biased" or "inaccurate."  

This is crazy. Any political leader in the world would label some news organizations as biased. Politicians don't like the media in general because it reports so much bad news about them – thereby keeping them honest and accountable to the people. I'm not suggesting that conservatives are more anti-free speech than liberals, but that the conditions in the U.S. (maybe in Canada too) are dangerously ripe for media censorship and government control. 

One has only to look to Russia to see where we could end up. The 2017 documentary Icarus gives us a taste of government deception at its best (or worst). If not for a critical whistle-blower, the doping scandal of the Sochi Olympics would have never seen the light of day. The lengths to which the Russian government operated to cheat the system – led by the FSB (today's KGB) – were extraordinary. 

It became headline news in North America and Europe and led to a full investigation. It's why we saw no Russian flags this past winter Olympics. 

In Russia, the public is largely unaware. Their government continues to call it fake news.