Conflicting story lines

What is truth what is fiction. We rely on the media for virtually all of our information and of course this places the media in an extremely powerful position to influence us, not only on the fact or fiction of what is happening in the world but on our opinions in general.
When I was growing up the Establishment paper was The Times, before Rupert Murdock got his grubby hands on the paper and it was symbolic of our faith in the integrity of our "betters" that we believed what ever The Times printed. The correspondents in the field perhaps in some far flung country would ring their story through on a dickey line through the local exchange full of whistles and crackles for it to be deciphered by the person in head office in Fleet Street to be sub' edited and fitted into the papers format for printing. Sometimes days elapsed before the story hit the street and events had moved on but we held the printed word on the page as gospel.
Today we are fed a diet of almost instantaneous news, shown on the television by a plethora of news channels, each competing for the sensational tit bits and each stretching the actual event for all it is worth. The amateur video scenes shot at the site of a story embellish the event with its own piquancy and we are asked to believe what our eyes tell us. Of course what our eyes tell us is not the same, there is no universal "us" our eyes feed the event into the brain and we interpret what we wish to conclude from what we see.
The BBC, ITV. SKY, CNN are part of the western club and like any club its members are assumed to 'belong'.
Down the road is another relatively young media hound Al Jazeera and further down the road still is RT the Russian, English language service.
Watching world events on the 'local media' can at times be quite bland as they focus on events close to home with a strong domestic content. CNN are the glitzy side of the news presentation where emphasis is places as much on the news caster as a celebrity as on the news they project. The Arab world is well handled by Al Jazeera especially their human stories of the plight of the poor.  RT is a strange mixture. It is generally anti American and marginally less so of the nations of the European Union. In differing from our home grown media news it is an interesting source of counter information and on many occasions one learns of events, usually violent street protests that some how never make it to the pages of our media.
The debates are interesting because they have the contra voices of people, often academics from the American and British universities who decry the Establishment agenda and it is refreshing to hear views which are not party political but fundamental Political formulations of opinion that need to be heard for "us" the people to form our own opinion.
What is refreshing is the knowledge that these Academics can flourish in our Western societies and are free to broadcast their opinion without fear of reprisal.  RT rarely broadcast pro-western views from the Russian academic society which indicates either they have no dissenting views or the dissenters are too scared to raise their voices. You take your pick !!