Right, if a blogger wants to be sophistic (misleading with some grains of possible truth), they can say Athlete A makes $80 million and Athlete B makes $10 million. And it people were to dig deeper, they might find out that the $80 mil is a 5 year contract, so actually $16 mil per year. And Athlete B, who makes $10 mil might be on a 1 yr contact and he might have bonuses like making an all star team ($500,000 bonus), getting a gold glove ($500,000 bonus), being top 10 in MVP voting ($1 mil bonus), etc, etc, so that Athlete B has the potential to make close to what Athlete A makes.
Now, with athletes, the specifics of their contracts tend to be very transparent, so this kind of misinformation is not likely. The same is not true of the movie industry. On top of that, all it takes is one blogger to tweet something, someone else re-tweets it, and someone's speculation or misinformation has now become fact in many people's eyes (I saw articles headings that said: "Official Bird of Prey team announced"... how misleading is that?).
We all need to be more discerning as a culture. I have to say, having grown up slightly before the ubiquity of social media (only slightly before
), it is fascinating to watch how the media in its various forms have run rampant, often unchecked (giving the honest media people a bad name) and the lack of effort on our part to think for ourselves, but rather, to jump to conclusions and then stand by those conclusions no matter the new evidence that may pop up that could discredit our prior "understandings."
I remember that the media used to be all about facts, fact checking, who, what, when, where, and why. Now it's who can get information out,
any information, the fastest. Truth be damned because if I'm wrong, nobody will remember. It won't matter if what I said affects someone's reputation or may not be accurate. I got my clicks for another day. And of course if the truth comes out, I certainly won't put out a correction and hold myself accountable. Pre-internet, journalists went to school. Now anyone can be a blogger, youtuber, tweeter with a following, etc. The standards are far from what they used to be. And what's the media after all? It stands for "the middle." They are the one's the stand between the common people and those on the other side. It's through the media that our ideas about others are shaped. This is why it is so important that people hold themselves to higher standards, both the media and the rest of us.
/soapbox
