Over at Eject! Eject! Eject!, Bill Whittle writes in with part 2 of his article Seeing the Unseen. He does a great job debunking a lot of the insane conspiracy theories that people have been circulating regularly - everything from the Loch Ness Monster, Kennedy, Man on the Moon fakery, contrails, 9/11 conspiracies and more.

I had a conversation with my Dad recently where I was talking about about depressingly common a lot of these theories are and how difficult it is to reach an agreement on what we should do as a society when people have such a weak grasp of reality.

Bill comes to a conclusion at the end which I a heartily agree with (though I would go further and include all media) - our Hollywood media is so detached from reality that they feed these conspiracy theories under the guise of artistic license.

I would never support any sort of governmental approval of media topics. I really want the media to come to the realization that they are an essential part of our system of government. Without a functional media, we the people don’t get the information we need to determine if our elected officials are doing the job we elected them for, we don’t find out about things in the world that we need our leaders to address, we don’t find out about threats and opportunities in the world that need to be addressed. Right now, our media is a mess: it’s great if you want to know who the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s child is or if you want to know only the information that NPR, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or John Stewart want to tell you. They are only going to tell you what will support their cause of the day. Anything that hurts the cause is withheld, minimized, or ridiculed.

Look, being impartial is HARD. I mean really HARD. Your philosophy professor from college will tell you that it’s impossible, but for some reason too many media people seem to think that means they shouldn’t even try.

Ultimately I have some hope that the Internet can provide that level of information to replace our currently broken media establishment, but there needs to be huge improvements in the search-ability, validation, and breadth of available information before this can work. Until then, our traditional media needs to work. And the necessary changes can only come from the inside.