Manufactured Beliefs?

Last night we went and saw a doco called Control Room' (see http://www.controlroommovie.com). It is about the Arab TV channel Al Jazeera. It proved to be not only another interesting take on the war in/on Iraq, but also a window into the world of the media and the power journalist's can wield. It got me thinking about how much information we are fed in today's society and how easy it is to sculpt this info to suite a myriad of agendas.

After reading Chomsky's 'Media Control' i was taken aback by the interrelation of democracy and media manipulation. Manufacturing consent is the name given to this process (it's also another Chomsky title) Both the books and the movie make the point that in our culture which is influenced by numerous media sources, we are constantly given an external focus upon which to fix our eyes. This enables our government to gloss over our interal problems for the greater cause of uniting to fight the common enemy of terrorism or whatever it is at the time. Now while i don't seek to endorse action taken on behalf of terrorists or their like, we could definietly use the resources committed to this war in my city/community rather than help damage an already sick nation thousands of miles from our homes.

Then again perhaps i have been listening to too much of this media control propoganda and my own view has been distorted by my own misinformation.

Now apart from the political side it makes me wonder what in my spiritual life do i believe because of misinformation? I know that some things quoted as almost scripture are just doctrines created by man and often regurgitated as part of a specific 'culture'. But it can somtimes be suprising to find myself quoting or acting on beliefs that, when i think about it, don't have a concrete theology behind them. It is scary the hurt i may have caused because of this misinformation. Now that takes me down a frightening path, to question all that i believe or thought i believed, seems like a daunting task. Maybe it would be easier to keep going along with all that commonly accepted stuff?
-case