Do you know what you're being fed? Truthiness or Fact?

As much as I would like to say I am not a victim of "truthiness", unfortunately I think all of us at some point are forced to rely on nothing more than our gut feeling about something.  We are constantly bombarded with contradictions about what is healthy or not.  One day high fructose corn syrup is the worst thing possible and the next day it's just syrup made from corn - it has to be healthy, right?  So with all the information that is being shoved down our throats on a daily basis we have to learn to sort that in some way.  We usually do this through our intuition about the facts.

Science writers may sometimes choose to tell the truthiness simply because they believe the information that they are providing.  I would hope that the intent would not be to mislead but instead to offer the best possible explanation for what may be a very confusing array of information.  In this case the writer is providing what they think is the most accurate fact, even if they are using their intuition in order to arrive at this fact.  I would suggest that the writer would also have to do research and provide additional sources with this fact in order to arrive at their gut instinct instead of the other way around.

If information began to be replaced by truthiness in the media I honestly don't think the majority of people would notice.  That may seem like a bleak outlook at the human race, but honestly with our scientific literacy in this country, I find it unlikely that the average person is doing background research on anything they hear in the media anyway.  Most people take information that they hear in the media (be it, television, news, twitter, radio, etc) and accept that information as fact with a second question.  There are several "fact" based sites that you can follow on stumble upon or twitter in order to obtain strange or uncommon facts; these facts do not come with a side of sources or data, and thus most people take them as honest fact when in reality my little brother could have a twitter called "THE MOST AMAZING FACTS" and be tweeting anything that pops up into this 11-year-old head.  I therefore make the sad claim that: the average person would NOT notice if they were being fed truthiness or fact.