OTM #3 - 1957 Fidel Castro & Cuba

There were several rumors about Fidel Castro being dead for a long time. To be honest, I don't know a whole lot about this subject other than what I heard on the On the Media audio recording the week of Nov, 23rd. But what I did find was that the press censored a lot of papers including information about what was actually happening in Cuba, and we were wrong about a lot of things that we thought. What they revealed in this segment was that many important and key factor specifics from these stories were actually clipped right out of articles before they were sent out to the US and other places. A lot of effort was put into the hiding of these secrets. The thing that never ceases to surprise me about these things though, is how surprised other people are at the skewed stories that we get from newspapers, politicians, television, and more. Money runs the world. And without money, companies fail. That being said, stories are given that will keep audiences reading. Whether they are completely true, or skewed is not as of an importance as just if it will keep people reading and interested. If people aren't intrigued to read or watch stories, they won't keep reading or watching. If this happens, advertisements won't be seen, funding will go down, and companies will fail. This is what leads to agenda setting, that we talk about in The Agenda Setting Theory. This is the theory that media sets the agenda for us, and we kind of just take whatever they give us. This is a big problem because the places we are relying on for our information, are not always accurate. For example, everyone that led us to believe that Castro was dead. Well the thing is, that most of those stories and news providers may have not even known that they were giving out false information, because it was already skewed and things had been removed from information before it even got to the producers! There's a lot of problems that can be caused by this, but one thing we can do to help that is to just become more aware of what is happening and become knowledgeable about the Agenda Setting Theory.