Mark Daly (Fianna Fail)

Thomas Jefferson said that if one expects people to be ignorant and free one expects what never was and never shall be. At the time he was talking about education. In today's world he would be talking about the media and the importance of its role in ensuring freedom. We have seen in the Arab spring how media, in particular social media, played its role. We need a free media in order to ensure that democracy in all its flaws is maintained so that people can be informed of the facts about what is happening not only in their country but throughout the world. Nowadays, it is difficult to see the balance between the facts and the opinions portrayed by some members of the media. Facts are portrayed as opinions and vice versa. Not only are they reporting the agenda but they are driving it.

An interesting comment was made by a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman, who wrote a book, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. He was talking about experts on television and he said he knew what it was to find something out; therefore he saw how they got their information. He did not believe that they knew it, as they had not done the necessary work or checks and they had not taken the necessary care. He was suspicious that they did not know, and that they were intimidating people. As a Nobel prize winning physicist he said that before he even puts pen to paper, he knows how much he needs to know, before he would be able to tell people with certainty that those are the facts but that today economic experts and commentators on all areas of political and social life go on television and portray what they are saying as facts. Mr. Feynman questioned how much research they have done to be able to communicate what they say as facts to the public because once people hear it they believe it to be true.