There are many people who swear by an incredible product, only to find that the product is not the best. We are not a product that can be evaluated by some objective standard. We can only know what we get. This is the only way we know for sure.
I am a consumer. I buy a thing and I am in control of how to use it. I ask questions and I think about the answer. I am responsible for my actions. This is true of the media we consume. We are consumers of information and we are also consumers of information that we consume.
The quality of information is the most important factor when you are evaluating media, particularly in this age when so much of it is “fake news.” Some of it is definitely “fake.” But it takes a lot of work to be so bad that you can’t evaluate it and some of it is just plain fake. We should all be able to make a judgment about what we accept and what we don’t.
The problem is when we don’t make quality judgments about media. When we are so preoccupied with making judgments that we have no time left for critical thinking (our default mode) that we don’t care for what is true for us, then we end up accepting all kinds of falsehoods. Because we don’t really know what is and what is not true for us, we just blindly accept whatever comes from the media.
CMs are similar to the media in that they often lie to us. CMs are a part of the media because they are meant to give us a brief window into the minds of persons we are familiar with, but because they do not have any sort of scientific backing, they are inherently untrustworthy. They are full of inaccuracies and are often meant to be as misleading as possible.
There are three main types of CMs: Factual, Opinion, and Pseudointimentum. All three are equally untrustworthy, but factual CMs are the easiest to spot. A factual CMM is usually just a vague claim that has nothing backing it up. The other two types of CMs are Opinion and Pseudointimentum. Pseudointimentum is a type of CMM that is intended to be misleading.
The main difference between Factual and Opinion CMs is that the former is meant to be as detailed as possible, while the latter is meant to be more subjective. The opinion-based ones are more subjective but, well, sometimes they are kind of accurate.
Factual CMs are generally not very detailed because they contain little or nothing on which to base an opinion. If they’re trying to claim something factual, it’s probably just an opinion—a generalization that isn’t backed up with any sort of evidence. And the other two types of CMs are Opinion and Pseudointimentum, like Factual CMs.
Both the Opinion and Pseudointimentum CMs are based off of the word opinion. That is to say, they are based on the opinions of people who have similar opinions. They are also both based off of the word opinion because they are both opinion based CMs, the last sentence being just a random twist on a sentence.