While we all conceptually understand that there is bias in everything, it must be a context that is taken into account with every reading. Why is that? Well if you don't take into account the bias of any given author, you naturally give credence to (or accept) any assumption that the author walks in with before even putting words on a page. That is dangerous. We all learn in school that even journalism, arguably objective reporting, will have bias. A liberal, atheist, vegan will approach everything (from education to abortion to women's rights to entertainment) very differently than a conservative, theist, hunter. We might jokingly say that then all journalism should be only attempted by moderates, but that's not the point. Everyone believes something, and that something colors how they perceive the world around them, and that perceived color will impact how we act.
In this blog, I want to consider a lot of the questions that maybe get overlooked because they are so fundamental. Perhaps because they are so fundamental, they are not really practical to consider outside of a philosophy class or something, because they don't pragmatically get us anywhere. It's difficult to draw on how it immediately impacts our day-to-day. However, just because it doesn't change the ins and outs of our daily lives (e.g. grocery shopping, paying rent, going to work, etc...) doesn't mean that it's not important. I've found that in order to change any of the day to day, we need to begin with a paradigm shift. I want us to be able to flesh out the assumptions that we just naturally assume, why we might assume them, and whether or not those assumptions are valid. It's a simple exercise to explain but perhaps significantly more difficult to accomplish. However, I think we ought not be daunted by that difficulty, rather we should take that challenge to really examine our lives, how we live, and why we live that way.
