Italians are not fairly informed about what happens in their country. If this statement seem to be too strong just give a look at things like this to get a confirmation.
The three main causes of biased information are
- Communicative noise from source of information supposed to be reliable
- Too much complexity in the few fair analyses available to large public
- Lack of effectiveness in the way information is made available to large public
Here is called communicative noise the misleading message sent by sources of information supposed to be reliable that send out with the same voice official statements or statistics and pure propaganda without clearly distinguish what is what. The noise can easily cause misunderstanding in people lacking time and will to dig into the news to figure out what is really going on.
The excess in complexity is quite common among fair analyses. Highly skilled professionals (for example here and here) invest time in the effort to give an explanation to economic and political events. However the result is usually hard to understand for people without specific education and serious interest.
The ineffectiveness existing communication is due to messages too concise (e.g. slogan, newspaper title, short tv announcement or advertisement) or too detailed (long discussion on very specific topics on blog or never-ending discussion in public debates). What is definitely missing is a series of summaries well structured and easy to understand.
So what?
We can complain and talk about how bad is the situation or we can try to fix it. How? Internet is an extremely powerful tool to spread ideas and social network can easily compound the transmission mechanism. A fair information is absolutely feasible: why don’t we give it a try?
