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"You can easily be blinded

"You can easily be blinded by the conventional wisdom blaring out from the television each day. Many news organizations, for example, leaned in the direction of Middle East terrorism the day in 1995 when the Oklahoma City federal building was leveled by a bomb. The attack, after all, had all the classic signatures of Islamic terrorism. Not everybody was convinced. A tiny Middle Eastern news service in Washington wrote a piece suggesting the attack might have been the work of American militia groups. How did they know? The journalists sat down, looked at the date, April 19-the second anniversary of the federal government’s botched raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Texas-pulled together some reporting they had done previously on the subject, and wrote their story. How did they go against the consensus so obvious to all of the experts advancing their views hourly on CNN? Easy, one of the editors later told the Washington Post: We don’t have CNN on in our office during the day. It is much too distracting when you’re trying to think."

http://www.publicintegrity.org/1999/03/01/3346/open-your-mind

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