How Can We Know the Truth?

On unknowncountry.com, we drive some of our readers nuts! We get criticized regularly for being too left wing?and also for being too far to the right. We’ve been called both hawks and peaceniks, for and against Israel, pro-Bush and anti- Bush. We get e-mails filled with invective and exclamation marks, criticizing us for contradicting ourselves. Recently we’ve put up stories saying that Osama bin-Laden has been captured?or not, that two of his sons may or may not have been captured and that the recently nabbed terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was already dead. We’ve also given several possible dates for the start of the Iraqi war. With so many conflicting stories, how can our readers find out the truth?

Unlike some news services, we only get our news from legitimate sources and we print links to those sources at the bottom of every story, so you can check them out for yourself. If there’s no computer link (or if you have to subscribe to read the original story), we tell you in the text where the story came from. If we later find out the story isn’t true, we always print a retraction. However, if several of these legitimate news sources contradict each other, how can you tell which one is telling the truth?

The problem is, they may all think they’re being truthful. Foreign news may be obviously censored or it may be more subtly influenced by governments and popular opinion. This is especially frustrating when it comes to news about UFOs, since all reporters start with the assumption that there must be some simple explanation, even if they can?t provide it. This is a clear example of bias, but the ways in which news is censored in the U.S. are usually more subtle than that. During times of crisis (like we’re in now), the government has been known to ask a few newspaper editors not to print something. There used to be major complaints that the press was left wing, and this was true during the Nixon/Watergate era, when the print media was largely locally controlled. But now that major corporations have bought up our nation’s newspapers, the press leans to the right (as big business always does), which is why Clinton was excoriated for a sexual escapade. The trouble is, neither the right or the left can see the whole picture.

One of the main problems is that, while reporters occasionally dig up some dirt, they mostly only know what they’re told, so there’s a lot of stuff we don’t get to know either. We find this out when things are leaked later. This means that the only thing we DO KNOW is that there’s a lot going on that we DON’T KNOW. But if we can’t know the truth now, we can at least be ready to learn it later by keeping an open mind and being willing to change our minds when new evidence comes along.

Some may call us indecisive but we know what we really are: seekers of truth! And that’s why we plan to continue driving you nuts.

NOTE: This Diary entry, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.