Untrusted Sources

Marshal McLuhan years ago posited that “the medium is the message.” Steven Charleston, a Native American Episcopal priest, offers what appears to me to be a correlation in his book The Four Vision Quests of Jesus:?

“We trust the media, not the message.”

Maybe it is just me, but I worry about how often a message is discounted because of our past experiences with its source.?

Now let me say at the outset that some sources have earned our skepticism. They have a history of shaping information to their own ends (something of course that the rest of us never do). But sometimes that effort moves past mere shaping into a destruction, not only of the facts themselves, but of the causes that they oppose. And given that history, it is wise to at least approach what is being communicated with a wary eye.

That being said, I have to remember an old quote that I have heard since forever.?

“Even a pig finds an acorn every once in a while.”?

Granted, the worrisome source may have a history, but that history does not preclude them offering some helpful addition to the conversation.

Even you and I occasionally have a new thought, something that bubbles up from an article we read or an experience that we had that causes us to rethink that which we had trusted previously. If that is possible for us, it is also possible for those with whom we disagree.

All of which leads me back to Charleston’s quote, and a reminder to test the message itself before discounting it simply because of our history with its source.?

The opposite is also true. Messages from people “on our side” need to be given due consideration as well. Just because they have historically agreed with us does not make them always correct, sad as that is to admit. We have to honestly confess that not all of our pronouncements are pure genius. The same is true for those of our tribe, our silo, or whatever we call those gathered sources that constitute the voices we choose to trust.

I admit that it complicates things more than a bit, but we need to at least lend an ear to what “they” are saying. Just as we are not always right, there is some possibility that they are not always wrong, and we need to be aware lest we miss something helpful because we immediately dismiss the source. It would be a shame to miss an important message simply because we immediately discounted the medium from which it came.