What News Is True?
Growing up, getting the news was pretty easy. For national news on tv you had the 3 major networks who each had a half hour show around dinner time. The local news was covered by the 3-4 stations in the nearest city. For print news, if you lived near a major city there was usually a morning paper and an evening one. There were local papers too, even in small towns. Radio had a wider audience as some signals covered vast sections of the country. The sources of radio news usually were the same for tv. Most stations had a few minutes at the top of the hour for news.
For the most part, the news was assumed to be true. There was trust factor if it came from tv, radio or print. Occasionally there will be a big deal if one of the mediums got a story wrong, but this was rare.
Today, one can get bombarded from “news” sites from all over the world 24 hours a day. Each major, and some minor, newspapers from every country and city in the world have web sites. Same for tv stations and radio. Facebook is the news site in some locations. The issue is, can the sites be trusted? This is very hard to figure out. If the country is a democracy with a free press then generally I would believe a lot of the news given out on these web sites. Any country were free speech and free press are in doubt then no, I would not trust them.
Facebook is a whole different issue. Anyone can pretty much post about anything. Yes, they have reviewers but if it sounds real and is not “offensive” according to them then it get posted. This is where “fake news” really came from. I saw items that were posted as “real” but I knew they weren’t. I also knew people who saw the same posting and they believed it was real. Not only did they believe it real, but they re-posted it to their friends. This creates a very dangerous situation. How do you keep people who would be considered rational from being sucked into the fake news world? I wish I had a good answer. I usually would think that common sense would make it easy to filter out untrue news, but I was shown many times how faulty that reasoning was by people who I thought had common sense.
It is critical that people take a much harder view at news. Don’t accept the first sites version of things. Give it a day or two to see if it really is a news story. If it is, it will be covered by the established news organizations. Our democracy is in danger if fake news can drive public opinion and public action.
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