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Leaders of Followers

The famous Greek philosopher, Aristotle, defined his laws of motion in around 340 BC. Aristotle believed that the heavier an object the faster it would fall.

Aristotle’s laws of motion were universally accepted until Galileo Galilei perform a rather simple experiment: he dropped objects of different weights from certain height and noticed that irrespective to their weights they all fall at the same time!

Galileo performed this experiment in 1600s, which means for almost 2000 years, the entire human race accepted a false belief and no one bothered to verify it!

This story tells us a lot about the beliefs and values that are accepted within a society. In a society there are very few leaders who think for themselves, question the accepted norms and define new values… the rest of the society are followers, who follow the leaders.

Fox News

A couple of months ago, I had gone to a friend’s place for dinner… my friend and I don’t really share the same political views but we rarely talk about politics.

Even though we don’t talk about politics, I think he did not like some of the stuff that I had been sharing on Facebook, and that night he decided to warn me about my choice of media.

“You are being misguided” he jumped to the point without any prologue.

He was genuine and his intensions were good but I had not seen his criticism coming… he said that I need to be more careful with the news websites that I read.

“Every story has 2 sides; you should read both sides of the story.” and he proudly added “I read both sides of the story.”

“Both sides”. Well, a judge in a courtroom should listen to both sides of the story because each side has a very biased version of the story. But why would anyone want to listen to a biased media at the first place?

I have heard this argument on Fox News and Fox News only. They proudly announce that they are reporting the “conservative side” of the story and make it sound normal… their anchors, Hanity and Pirro, have gone as far as standing on the podium and campaigning for Trump! This is not OK. It erases any line between the campaign and the news organisation. How can the network claim to have any degree of independence?

Fox accuses other networks of being equally biased, describing them as “far left media mob”. It’s certainly true that a network like New York Times is far left with respect to Fox, but that’s because Fox has shifted so far to the right… New York Times is actually very close to the centre on the media bias chart.

Getting Caught on Covid-19

On March 9th, Fox news anchor, Trish Regan, claimed that Corona Virus is a “democratic attempt to impeach the president”. It’s hard to believe but she made this claim on the same day that Italy started its nationwide quarantine. And she was not an outlier, the entire network downplayed the threat of Corona virus:

Politicising the virus was a wrong move and the network invested far too much in it, until mid-march when the tragedy hit the country hard and Fox had no choice but to do an abrupt U-turn on their stance.

Now the big question is, how would their viewers feel about this?

Hooman Bahreini

Shopless Ltd

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