It is an issue, especially if spreaded by trustworthy organizations. Maybe you can see through it, but your neighbor probably not, or your mother, or your child.
> especially if spreaded by trustworthy organizations
They not only spread, but they also create them. Media nowadays is in a pretty blatant exercise of framing conversations and not mentioning contrarian evidence for the agenda they are, most of the times very clearly, trying to push.
I always say the same. If you see a news piece that stinks propaganda, follow the author and go through his history or his twitter. Most of the times you'll discover a guy who has no shame, has not even the slightest intention of bringing you a reality that you have no direct experience of, and giving you the clues of what might be the truth.
An this people many times is not working for a no-name organization, but the WSJ, NYT, BBC, you name it.
In Spain this is so blatant and palpable that makes most media basically worthless. You're just reading opinions on events that they may not even made the exercise to check some sources or talk to somebody who has direct experience about. You have to look for who's the author and filter around it. Know their names. There's no other way around it.
IMO we are not even talking about bias here, it's like because journalists told themselves that knowing the objetive truth is impossible, then full swing the other way and be lazy, have no objections to blatant propaganda, and so on.
So reading, watching or hearing them is only useful as an exercise of know what they want people to think about. If you want to have any insight you really need to filter through names, and if you're lucky reach specialized media, which tends to be another totally different story, because obviously people who has direct experience of something is way harder to convince of some BS.
Edit: This may be useful for some people. I decided to use a custom CSS extension to highlight the authors that I did the painful process of checking their background and analyzer their reports. I can't do for everyone but it improved my experience in a few news sites, since remembering all names is difficult.
I loathe the "But a baby can't chew steak!" line of arguements. We will get nowhere assuming universal incompetence and feebleness, certainly not competence and strength with such expectations holding us back.
