Reading #1

A big piece I gained from this reading is that misinformation is necessarily always wrong, it just might be biased toward a political party or certain point of view on a topic. I thought this is important because I am very passionate about what I believe in as a Christian. There are many topics that are argued in this area of belief and sometimes many people are not looking at the real source of information like the Bible. Instead, they turn to some scholarly work that may be biased towards a certain side of the argument.

An interesting story in the reading was the false story about Guy Lockey and deer hunting. It was reported that this store owner, Guy Lockey, who did not even exist, put orange vests on over 400 deer to make hunters believe they were humans and not shoot. This story was supposedly reported by the Associated Press, reliable news source, but it really wasn't. The story streamlined through to Fox News, ESPN.com and Wall Street Journal Online. The reading states a profound statement of "...we as a nation depend on a free press to give us a dose of daily facts." I believe this statement is very true, and it is because of this that college students including myself will take anything we find on the internet and use it for our schoolwork. Whether it may be true or not, we are in such a rush to do our work that we do not pay attention to the source. At the same time, we are comfortable in the state that all information is reliable. It's a belief that if it's printed somewhere, even the Internet, it is somewhat reliable. Except Wikipedia which has really been a source being drilled into students heads by professors that it is not reliable.

These are two areas in which, starting with myself, as college students we need to get out of our comfort zone and really do our research on not just information for our papers, but the sources of the information.