Is the economy recovering or deteriorating? Does wearing masks help? Is the virus a life-threatening issue? Do lockdowns work? Is there a working vaccine? These are fairly straight-forward questions, but you get two decisively different answers depending on your choice of news source. There’s often two different camps to each question -- and what’s the denominator for those two different camps? It’s a political one. The line of reasoning is totally influenced by politics. The virus was long ago turned into a political football, and so have most other issues of today. Here’s the problem: nobody checks sources or underlying data — in fact there’s no way you can fact check a news report in today’s climate of bitesized news tidbits and tweets. So, when we’re debating or discussing matters based on what we’re fed in the news, we aren’t debating facts at all; we’re comparing brands. Why is there such disparity in terms of the narratives? Isn’t the news, well, the news? If the networks strived to reach some sort of objective truth, shouldn’t there be more agreement between the various networks?  Google and Facebook have picked certain channels as authoritative sources. However, there was no billion dollar research study behind this, no efforts to actually determine or validate whether or how much more reliable ABC is than Fox, etc. In other words, they picked their top brands. If you make a decision based on preference, it’s a brand choice, not a strictly rational, fact-based choice; it’s picking Coke instead of Pepsi. What’s the solution? Take a listen. Supporters of taim.io.