Fake news is a term that we have heard an awful lot of. But is it really all ‘fake’? Can we really trust journalists because they appear to be credible or represent a media outlet that appears legitimate from the outside? Are influencers and public personalities credible just because they have a platform with a ridiculous number of ‘likes’ or ‘follows’?

Speakers & ‘Influencers’ who need to invent credibility because their arguments have none:

Like most subjects being knocked around in the forums of public debate today, fake news is just another ridiculous umbrella term that has been coined by someone who wants to dismiss the arguments or facts being given by someone they disagree with, and they felt the need to be able to hide the inadequacy of their own views or ability to engage in a sensible debate by hiding it behind terms that people go along with – because the term sounds credible and they are afraid of what will happen if they don’t.

In this specific sense, throwing around terms like fake news just to dismiss someone else’s point of view is not only lazy; it is pretty much the same resorting to being nasty or calling people names when you are desperate to hide the truth in what they have to say.

Alternative Truths or Perceptions of the same experience or things:

OK, so fake news is a broader church. But that broader church is most often the difference that exists between one person’s truth, and the truth or true perspective on the same situation or topic as observed or experienced by someone else.

It doesn’t matter how persuasive an argument from one side can be. From the perspective of the individual, none of us experiences the same thing in exactly the same way. Indeed, even in an accident where only you are involved, there are always at least two truths: what actually happened, and then there’s how you experienced it yourself – ie your own.

Opinion presented as News:

Finally, there’s news which is actually opinion. And no, opinion is certainly not news in itself. Unless that is you were quite literally reporting something very subjective such as a story about a celebrity making a public statement about which political party they are going to support.

Regrettably, journalism within the mainstream has either become so poor or so corrupted by the wishes and aims of media platform owners, that very few of the so-called professionals that we access through supposedly credible channels every day, either don’t have the self-awareness to discern between what is the news and their own opinion, or they are deliberately pushing their opinions and abusing their position to influence the public in any number of different ways.

Learning to be a Critical Thinker:

Any one or all of the above may be at work within the news sources that you watch, read or listen to. It is therefore very healthy for us all to watch, read and listen with care.

Pick out the facts. Acknowledge and respect the content and presence of the opinion. But above all, do not let the opinion you have heard then influence how you feel about or how you have interpreted the news.

The easiest way to learn critical thinking – if you have not been taught and you don’t have the time to study the skill by reading a book or studying a course – is to follow and where possible read as many different sources on the same topics as you can.

Just by following different journalists and media platforms from right across the spectrum, you can quickly begin to appreciate the common themes – which on a universal basis will probably be the real news – and then begin to see the opinions, biases and yes – the propaganda at work.

Whatever you do, don’t let tribal thinking stop you from watching, reading or listening to media sources that are outside your ‘bubble’ or sit outside the mainstream. This is how echo chambers are created. It’s how we easily fall into group think. It’s how the destructive processes of relying on confirmation bias to legitimise views and perspectives is born.

It would be fair to say that even the most objective of writers will present their stories with a little bias – even if it really is the lightest touch. Simply because we communicate outwardly with the world based upon our past experiences and what information and interpretations of everything we have experienced we have then taken within.

However, once you can break down the structure of a news report, an interview or even a Facebook Post or a Tweet, you will soon realise that all forms of news and information about current affairs can be a much safer place that we are being told or than it would immediately seem.

We live in a world today, where there is an obsession over the historic wrongs of slavery that were inflicted on people who they are not and who they will never know, by people who are not you or I that we have never known.

Yet what these apologetic obsessives don’t even realise is that an even more oppressive form of slavery exists right now in this day and age. It is the system that we live, breathe, work and exist in, where the politicians and the elites are the masters. Where our belief in the value of money and the value of wealth are serving as our extremely repressive chains.

But when the crash or systemic collapse finally hits us, we have the choice of freedom that ancestors of all races and backgrounds who were physically enslaved in an even less enlightened world than today never had.

We can choose to say no more and take back the power we have given to others to use our own weaknesses against us and learn again to value and have values based on all that we already have.

The most obvious and apparently most simple way to deal with the Cost-of-Living Crisis is just to put the National Living Wage Rate up, as the Tories have planned for the 2022/23 Tax Year that begins in April.

Most low wage earners will jump at the opportunity to earn 50p an hour more, which works out as £20 extra for a 40-Hour Week and £1000 over the course of the year.

The problem that we now face in this respect alone is that prices of everyday items and energy on their own are likely to swallow up that amount from the pockets of many before the changes have even come into effect.

Whilst a Minimum Wage requirement seems like a very logical rule to have, the rather depressing and counterintuitive flip side of the National Living Wage is that it gives big employers a get out of jail free card when it comes to setting a realistic wage level for frontline roles within their business.

Greedy owners, shareholders and managers – often themselves being paid many times more than their frontline staff – are very happy to use the Minimum Wage benchmark because the Government has set the standard. And it works very well for them because there is an assumed belief that Government control is as far as it goes.

Companies are quite literally using the reference point of the National Living Wage as an excuse not to pay more, when in many cases there is no doubt that they could.

The dilemma is that without the Minimum Wage – as was the case until 1999 – businesses will always pay the lowest paid workers the absolute minimum that they can. They would surely return to this way of employing staff in minimum wage levels were to be scrapped.

Just because employers can get away with anchoring wages around the level of the National Living Wage, it doesn’t follow that they actually should.

Many larger businesses could afford to pay staff more right now by reducing their profits. But as so many of these companies are now shareholder-led, there is an expectation that the bottom line and the dividend payouts will always be prioritised above employees instead.

The Cost-of-Living Crisis that our Politicians and Mainstream Media are now being forced to recognise is a life experience for many that is nothing new.

In fact, it is only because of the current circumstances that the Politicians and the Media have unwittingly encouraged that the situation is now beginning to become acute. The price to survive is starting to touch so many different areas of life, that the establishment can no longer avoid the truth that they find so unpalatable. The consequences of years of self-interest and inaction can no longer be kept out of sight.

Last Friday morning, Interviewers on BBC Breakfast News talked to paid carers and homecare companies struggling to find and provide staff to deliver a service that we may not want to accept that many of us at some point may need daily or perhaps more when we reach later life.

Social Care a political hot potato that is the subject of debate in its own right. But as an industry predominantly led by private profit-making companies, it offers perhaps one of the very best examples of how wage levels for staff in frontline hands-on roles are disproportionately low when considering the purpose that they fulfil.

Indeed, many of those who carry out this work require benefits or what are effective subsidies from the public purse in order that they can both work and survive.

Like many of the roles fulfilled by the people who are now beginning to struggle with the Cost-of-Living Crisis first hand, employed healthcare workers are being paid the Government set ‘National Living Wage’ or Minimum Wage, which from April will be £9.50 an hour, or £380.00 for a 40-Hour working week.

£19,760.00 per year simply isn’t enough for anyone to survive fully independently without support, benefits or going into debt on today’s terms.

There is a very important question that needs to be asked of our politicians: ‘Would you want to do, and would you enjoy doing a difficult and physically demanding job for a whole 40-Hour Week and then go to the shops and realise that food is a luxury that you cannot afford?’

The answer would of course be an unmitigated NO.

Whilst the rather obvious answer we would receive from our current Politicians would be sure to be accompanied by comments about all the benefits that are available to low wage earners to support them, there is another very important question the people ruling this Country should answer all of us too: ‘Why does the situation exist where Taxpayers are topping up millions of wages with benefits so that big and otherwise dysfunctional businesses can profit at levels which in most cases are absolutely obscene, given what they pay their frontline staff?’

Paradoxically, the work and effort that it takes those who are able to achieve wage levels that cover the cost of everything that they need is not something that a great many people really cherish or enjoy.

In fact, the quality of life that simple jobs with fixed hours without excessive travel would offer, would be something that many would choose to take – IF that kind of occupational lifestyle could achieve self-sufficiency with the security that everyone deserves as a minimum to achieve.

Despite what anyone with an interest in maintaining the perverse status and rules that allow all of this to exist will tell you, it is not impossible to change things and create a capitalist-based system where everyone can thrive and enjoy their lives fairly – rather than everything being funneled at the few and being maintained at the cost, expense and pain of everyone else who exists.

It is just a shame that we have a political class that is fixated with its own existence rather than seeing the real ills that society faces as something that can actually be fixed.

Sadly, for us all, in their obsession to maintain their positions, our Politicians have bolted shut the democratic doors.

Right now, there is no way we can get real leaders into Parliament who have the ability, wherewithal and commitment to do everything necessary to make life affordable and fair for all.