There is never a mere listing of facts, for they are too many and too confusing; they have no meaning without a context. What facts are chosen to be reported, and the interpretation which gives them meaning, are what public culture, the collective public mind decides. When the context is not accurate, as when it's distorted for partisan or commercial aims, then there can be no assurance that people understand what is really happening and that decisions can be made properly in response to events.

Media stories, especially on TV, are often so shallow, so carefully selected, so contrived, so subordinated to a predetermined story line, that they're not news at all, not even infotainment (because there's almost no information in them), but are merely entertainment posing as new reporting. Commentators choose hype instead of balanced reporting because they can't pen compelling headlines when interdependencies create gray zones instead of stark black and whites.

To justify such inferior communications, and to keep people interested, media executives and political activists create myths – stories that are compelling though not true or only partially true. In recent years, our public culture has passed into the hands of people who do this well – who are myth-builders, and many of us, avid consumers of myths in the disguise of information, have become mythomaniacs.