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The Simple Headlines Meant to Deceive Us
How the mainstream media keeps us blinded from reality
We feel the need to be informed. We seek news about what is happening in our communities, our nation, and the world. But, it’s so hard to know what to believe anymore. Yet, we still feel that we should have an opinion, because we are taught that it is our responsibility to be an informed citizenry that makes informed choices.
In our efforts to make sense of the overload of conflicting information that is presented to us, many of us feel pressured into choosing a side on every issue. There seems to be an underlying message that every issue is a moral issue, and the side we choose to take defines us as either good or evil people.
Dichotomous thinking is the propensity to think of things in terms of binary opposition, such as “black or white”, “good or bad”, or “all or nothing”. This thinking style can be viewed as the tendency to get stuck in either the thesis or the antithesis, unable to move toward synthesis (Linehan, 1993). In other words, dichotomous thinking is an “either-or” kind of thinking and not an “and” kind of thinking (Neuringer,1961).
Dichotomous information and judgments can be observed in daily life. In political settings, some people enthusiastically support politicians who give simple and…
