Our reality is fiction - what do the media build around us?

The world is huge, full of people scattered everywhere, even in distant places.

Still, it is our pleasure to know and learn what happens throughout the globe, be it in the near city or in the farthest continent across two oceans. How do we manage so?

1) here news were altered to cover the responsibilities 

of the US Administration - in particular of the 

then Secreatery of State  Hillary Clinton

The answer is that we get news. We read them, we hear them, we see them. Nowadays information is pervasive and goes all around very fast. And yet, is such information objective? Are we seeing the world as it truly is, or is the image we get somehow distorted?

Of course, when someone else is making you see through their eyes, when someone is speaking news to you, the information is subject to changes. It is like light passing through a set of lenses, it gets deformed, maybe filtered. It is one of the issues we encounter whenever we try to represent reality by words or other means; we stumble into approximations, mistakes, the occasional lies. This means that it can be difficult for us, for everyone, to get an acceptably reliable of the reality in most contexts. When you are not able to see things with your own eyes, you have to accept that your sources may be less than exact.

2) many people were involved in the papers 

leaked from Mossack-Fonseca's databases. 

Vladimir Putin was not directly involved, 

but he was still indicated as such

The result is that our perception of reality is quite subject to manipulations. Our society is bent on control, because it stands on its capacity to inhibit everyone's individualistic tendencies to homologate everyone within certain limits. Our society works if we are molded into average people, with predictable ideas and even more predictable behavior. To this end, the information we get is essential into creating the right mindset and worldview of the average citizens.

Here, the manipulation of information stops to be a casual sum of somehow imprecise reports. It is instead a picture crafted with the specific purpose of building a complacent public opinion. The media are the means to achieve this, a concert of newspapers, television networks, radio and so on that in chorus tells everyone what they need to hear. They set up our knowledge of what happens in the world, choosing which facts are to be reported and how. By presenting some evidence under a certain light, they can even appeal to our emotions and manipulate our morals. It happens that some civil wars are extensively covered (Syria anyone?) and others are not (Yemen, just for one). It happens with news preferentially saying that we are not in an economical depression anymore (except we actually are). Meanwhile, the public deficit and the public and private debts in most Western countries are still high and generally increasing. 

4) showing this dead kid was instrumental into 

convincing Europeans to open borders to 

refugees - and to others who refugees are not

Who controls the perception of reality can in fact mold reality itself.

Control of perception through media comes in different shapes, aiming to artificially create a variety of effects. If you want your media to efficiently manipulate people, you can pick your favorite mean:

1) alterate, hide or misplace information from a faithful context - or the reverse (e.g.: 09/11/12, the assault on USA ambassade in Libya)

2) suggest and present something as very likely, proofs taken for granted (since 04/03/16, Panama Papers)

3) greatly enhance or diminish the emphasis and coverage you give to the subject (Syrian civil casualties, depending if responsibilities are on Americans or Russians)

7) see, the key part here is It doesn't 

matter what Trump says. One just 

proves to have prejudices

4) overlook factual analysis to favor an emotional approach (09/02/15, little kid Alan 'Aylan' Kurdi)

5) extrapolate phrases, declarations, behaviors from the proper context (09/12/06, the Pope's Regensburg lecture)

6) integrate facts and reports with subjective interpretations, accusations or justifications (many immigrants' questionable deeds)

7) appeal to prejudices and build on established canons (Assad and Putin are dictators and must be removed from power; calls to arms against populism and racism and fascism)

8) distract people from some facts (potential scandals) and focus them on others (since 11/21/13, American vs Russian interferences in Ukraine)

and several others unpleasant specialties. They can be combined in creative ways. For instance, you may notice that the Russiagate will neatly fill into several of the categories numbered above. The result can be obtained without resorting to flat out lies. The truth is still a powerful weapon if honed right and pointed in a direction of choice (not against you). Of course, all is in the interest of bringing to us the truth as the mainstream wants it to be depicted. This is so widespread that most media follow common directions where things really matter.

8) American areas of influence are in 

the interest of democracy and freedom, 

of course. Russian ones, not so much

They give us a very subjective and partial view and tell us it is instead a full and complex representation. In the end, if we do not react, we internalize this truth and build our worldview around it. We put ourselves the basis to believe all the next pieces of the truth and we eventually grow blind to other sources of information. We may even reject other news as 'fake news', not realizing that fake news are everywhere, anytime, embedded in plain view the stream of the media. In the end, we are bombarded into submission and the ammunitions are carefully picked and modified news. 

That is, unless we take a stand and reclaim our rights.

We can choose to see and hear and read for ourselves. Think critically, compare sources, do not accept things just because. If we abdicate to those rights, we let others give us our believes already packaged with all the risks that entails.

On the basis of our believes we make our decisions. Once someone else controls that, it is because we have renounced to control our own future. Not a good thing.