"Mis-Information"

             Mis-information. The first thing that comes to mind when I ever hear this word is that someone was basically lied to or lead to believe something under false pretenses or mis-guidance on the informers part. The articles mentioned some various aspects that all deal with mis-information that I find unethical. The first is the Bandwagon effect where people believe things that others do, simply because others believe them. I think that if you are subjected to this type of information you deserve it because i feel like people who conform to this effect are followers. I can understand if you are misinformed and agree with a person, but if you don't have your own thoughts and feelings about a situation and don't express them because you want to follow the crowd it is terrible. Confirmation bias was another one that I take interest to. I think that people who are subjected to this are somewhat narrow minded and maybe a bigot at times. This is because most people who conform to this are will not accept others ideas or try to look at a topic from a different point of view. If someone wants to make their argument stronger, I feel as if they should look at the other side of an argument and find ways to argue against it instead of dismissing the ideas and finding information to support their own beliefs; instead of finding arguments only for you idea, find some valid proof that would falsely the opposing idea to make your argument stronger.
            The article that we read had a lot of information that I agree with included in it and one that I found particularly interesting that I wanted to touch on before describing a personal instance where I, and most of America, was misinformed is what the author says about free speech. The author posed the assumption that many may believe that limiting information may deny us our first amendment rights. However, he makes the valid point that a man who yells "FIRE" in a theater is not protected under this amendment. This, I feel, is true for media sources that falsify information. I agree that there are times where maybe the media source itself was misinformed and report falsely, but this may be the same as a man yelling "FIRE" when he truly believes that it really is a fire. For media to misinform their views, readers, or subscribers so that they may have the view point that would benefit them or a political standpoint, whatever it may be, is extremely detrimental to America in my belief.
              One time that I remember I was misinformed was after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Shortly after this tragedy that was imposed on all of America the United States invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Former President Bush made the report that the reason we were invading Iraq was because of "weapons of mass destruction". Surly most citizens felt it was necessary to go in an remove these weapons so America could feel safe. However, after a few months the story came out that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in the country and it is assumed that there never were. The speculation was that President Bush, and I am sure other members of his staff, wanted to invade Iraq, as well as Afghanistan for terrorism, was to find the person that was believed to be behind the 9-11 attacks, Osama bin Laden. After finding out that Osama was not even in Iraq but hiding in Afghanistan the invasion was targeted at rebuilding Iraq and its government. The war in Afghanistan was a legal war against terror, whereas the war in Iraq was illegal (according to the UN charter) and not approved by the United Nations. The misinformation led me to believe that we had a legitimate reason for entering Iraq and I was not as opposed to it before I found out that there were never any weapons of mass destruction. However, once the troops were in the country, they were not going to be deployed as easily. Many people are misinformed everyday whether intentionally or unintentionally. I think that the cycle will never stop but needs to be improved in media sources.

^^^^Misinformation^^^^ =)