My friend Anita sends me these words from Thomas Merton from his book Seeds. He is writing about the effect on us and our society of television. This is from over forty years ago. Consider these words and how our exposure has expanded with the internet and 24 hour coverage of events.
Today with the enormous amplification of news and opinion, we are suffering from more than acceptable distortions of perspective. Our supposed historical consciousness, over informed and over stimulated, is threatened with death by bloating, and we are overcome with a political elephantiasis which sometimes seems to make all forward motion useless if not impossible. But in addition to the sheer volume of information there is the even more portentous fact of falsification and misinformation by which those in power are often completely intent not only on misleading others but even on convincing themselves that their own lies are "historical truth".
- Thos. Merton (1968)