Most would say I am a historian of sorts, having started at the age of 8 by watching the History Channel back when it actually covered history, back to back documentaries on everything you could possibly think of. It was a history I wasn’t learning in the classroom and at times contradicted the biased education I was receiving.When I wasn’t watching, I was reading and when I wasn’t reading I was listening to the one person in my life that never disappoints, my grandfather. History amazed me and my grandfather, who fought in World War II with his brother-in-law, was who intrigued me with the screening of “The World At War”, the first historical documentary I watched and I immediately fell in love; I was eight years old, and that love hasn’t ceased for a moment. The love is not for war or dissension or uprising and violence, the love is for the story and legacy, its preservation and most importantly: its different perspectives and context.
History, however, is a dubious affair. Our public education system is organized in layers, each subsequent year of your schooling another layer is added to the history which you have already been taught. The first layer being more than elementary and oftentimes exaggeration or downright misinformation and the proceeding layers adding a bit more depth to the historical subject at hand.
Very much so, is the way The Capitol, also head of the Department of Education, provides information to the general public, in layers, layers of all sorts. It is the very job of “Watchdog Journalists” to peel through these layers or discover hidden ones and to do so, that requires covering the “not so sexy” over the “sexy”; short term you could lose your job, whatever weight you held in your office or, long term, you can win a Pulitzer Prize.
When the media was getting too close to areas of government where they weren’t welcome, we, the people, gave them the perfect solution: the Internet Overload. With so much information on pertinent subjects to our social well being, as individuals and as a nation, being thrown at us from different sources, newspapers, TV, blogs, Facebook, etc. it makes it very easy for us all to wonder: who’s telling the truth?