know it all

And when you trust your television,
what you get is what you got,
cause when they own the information,
they can bend it all they want.

When I started watching the news more and sustaining my interest in the world beyond high school, guitars, and college prospects, I had one goal in mind: to become well-informed. I wanted to know what the hell I was talking about when I wrote SAT essays on crap that I had previously only vaguely pieced together that week using Wikipedia. I wanted to understand, especially, the world of politics.

Becoming a little more "well-informed" proved harder than I thought. But I wasn't getting sick of reading or watching the news all the time-- I love the media. It was more because I was starting to notice the media spoon-feeding me stories coated with a substantial layer of bullshit. To watch the news isn't enough to be well informed. Nearly every piece of news is to some degree editorialized; but that I don't blame, since everyone has their personal opinion. It's those whose primary jobs are to inform, yet they have no problem being outlandishly opinionated with illogical arguments that I can't stand. Especially on political topics, it's like some media outlets only stand to help a specific party or politician get the spin they need to convince average citizens however dishonest the arguments can be. In this age of America's dependence on mass media, it's depressing that the media people, especially those on TV, actually knowingly choose to bend facts to their political leanings at all. People are making choices shaped by the information they're given, and that does include voting. So much for democracy.
Initially, I thought this was all just a great distraction to becoming a little more aware and informed as someone who is soon going to be able to vote, but apparently it is a reality to live with and learn from. I can't really trust some news programs to tell me anything useful straight off the bat; I have to just keep observing mainstream media as a whole and how certain outlets present the news and formulate my own speculations on certain topics and people with regard to what the media has done with the news. My goal of being well-informed doesn't simply comprise just hearing about what's going on in the world anymore-- I want to always see how stories are reported, and which parts of the report affect how people perceive it.