Barking up the wrong tree

I'm not sure why this caught my eye:

I once heard from a Russian reporter about her early days on the job. “Whenever we read an article about the health dangers of butter, we would immediately run out and buy as much butter as we could find,” she told me. “We knew it meant there was about to be a butter shortage.” In other words, Russians looked only for the agenda, the motivation behind the assertion. The actual truth was irrelevant. 

It seems that more and more I am also looking for the agenda behind what people write, even for news stories, academic communication (especially outside of journals), etc. I don't know if this is getting worse, or if I am simply finally waking up to the way things have always worked. Probably the latter.

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution