The Cost of Tickling Our Ideology

The Cost of Tickling Your Ideology

It amazes me how easily people will buy into “logic” that tickles their ideology.

Yesterday, I posted a video about how the New York Times used a picture of a sick child to illustrate its story on starving children in Gaza.

The picture was a lie, plain and simple.

The child is not starving from a lack of food but sick with other medical conditions.

As a former journalist, that appalls me.

That’s out and out lying to the public.

Some of you understand that and are as repulsed as me.

But many commenters ignored the facts and went right for tickling their virtue with a stroke or two to their ideology.

They tried to make the story of the fake picture about starving children.

Yes, there’s a huge problem, so it seems, but how can you trust a journalist with a story if they lie with a picture?

If a paper is willing to trick us with a picture, why do we trust it with the story?

The President they hate, publicly addressed the issue.

But those same people seem to give the NYT a pass for misleading the world with a fake picture, because they agree with the story told.

Can we trust the reporting of news to a paper that will lie to us with a picture?

I can't.

Both the lie and the story of supplies not reaching the children are an outrage, but when we get so loosey-goosey with our morals that one wrong outweighs another, we’re on the slippery slope to cultural extinction.

The NYT does not get a pass.

The paper should do a retraction, not on its public relations website, where no one reads, but on the front page where it lied to us the first time.

They put the correction on a PR page with 89k people and not on its X account, which gets far more views.

We agree that if aid is not getting to the people of Gaza, we need to find out why and fix it.

But if we don’t have trusted sources for information, how do we discern right from wrong?

How do we know this is happening?

We allow our ideology and virtue to be tickled and call it fact.

Have we not learned anything?

Tyranny is the result of not asking questions and being lulled by information that makes you feel good.

Information that agrees with our palette.

I don’t know about you, but lying does not make me feel good, and I certainly will not base my facts on a source that seems to care less as long as it can sell its story and its newspaper.

And when it makes a monumental "mistake," its apology is placed only in the places where the fewest people will see it.