Who can we trust?

After reading all the documents, and especially the articles, I feel worried. It is known that some citizens are poorly informed and that they don’t care about politics, but we know how to deal with that problem, as the democracy still works despite it. But now, reading these articles, we have to face another challenge: citizens are mis-informed.
Citizens usually have to be informed about politics, relayed by the media, which is what Jennifer Jerit and Jason Barabas call the “information environment”. Politics always use rhetoric in order to convince the voters. They are not lying but they present things in a certain way, underlining some parts of the facts and hiding others, in order to make their speech more convincing, as we can see with the example used in the essay Bankrupt Rhetoric- example of the social Security pp280. This political practice leads to misinformation because citizens miss some parts of the fact. But isn’t this misinformation part of the “game”? We cannot imagine a democracy where everyone agrees on the facts, and where nobody is trying to influence the other by modifying the reality.

In addition to the spreading of misinformation due to the politics themselves, the media also influences citizens. It has to relay political speeches and debates that are already transformed by politics. Furthermore, journalists are biased so they are in turn going to transform the facts in order to make them fit the political inclination of the newspaper. Moreover, what is the role of citizens in this process? Can they interfere in order to fight against this misinformation?
The problem is that even if we know that the media isn’t objective, we are tempted to believe what we hear and see. This makes me think of a very striking example. In march 2010, one of the most popular channels of Georgian TV broadcast an old footage dating from 2008, in which, Russians invaded Tbilisi, Georgia. The problem was that they didn't inform the viewers that the footage was an old document, so Georgians thought that Russians were currently invading... You can imagine that scenes of absolute panic happened: Georgians tried to reach their relatives, women went to supermarket in order to buy stocks in prevision of the war, some people even died from heart attacks. This makes us realize the power of the media. It can make people believe everything: it is not only misinformation in this case, it is clearly disinformation.

To conclude, I would like to ask you if you think that citizens have still enough criticism to protect themselves from the dangers of misinformation?

Link to an article about this event in Georgia:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/14/russia-georgia-fake-invasion-report