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Questions on social media (1)

Yesterday, I found the following video on more than one channel of communication I maintain, including e-mail and social media timelines.


The video is a Fox News interview with Reza Aslan on his new book on Jesus. I find Fox's "critical" questioning of Aslan's work quite uncritical. I also find Aslan's defense graceful yet exactly the kind of critical that the discussion as a whole should have been. As Aslan points out, instead of targeting the 8 or so questions over 10 minutes towards the author's personal life, Fox should have targeted the questions towards the arguments put forth in the literature.

In any case, I think the discussion on social media has been lazily unfair. How many people who are cajoled into ridiculing Fox news as "ignorant", "bitchy", "low", "illiterate", etc. have actually read Aslan's book and genuinly understand him?

Further, how many people actually make informed judgments as Aslan is encouraging us all to do? I find that we tend to react to works like these exactly how Fox News did: By taking things at face value and repeating them for others as true, valid and coherent information.

We all inject our values when we perceive media. A coherent comment on any media should enhance its quality through questioning and/or critical revision. Otherwise, if it is being promoted or dismissed based on seemingly opinionated and subjective comment, how will we assess information in the future?

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