The credibility of the trusted

As I was growing up in the 1980s and 90s, if you read a newspaper you could take it as fact. The same could be said about the local and national news on television. No matter what paper you read or what channel you preferred your news, it was literally the same news, just different reporters reporting it. Fast forward to today’s sources. It is different on every channel and in every paper. Everyone has a different view of what happened, or it does not appear at all.

What happened? We used to see Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite and we knew we were getting an unbiased report. We trusted them. It did not matter if it was the Seattle Times or USA Today, we had the same story on the same people. Today, nothing is the same. It is as if we are all watching different versions of our favorite reality T.V. show.

Social Media and the internet have also played their part and, really, it may be the downfall of the investigative reporter. Everyone wants to be first to drop the bombshell information, and far too often no facts are checked before spilling the news to the globe. We also now experience the insta-phone reporter who records the events they witness. After a little editing, the resulting video becomes the on-the-ground report to sway the viewer one way or the other.

There was a time that the only place you saw an opinion was on the editor’s page. But now it is everywhere, depending on who is paying the bills of this or that network or media outlet. Have we become subject to our own tech world and our slippery agendas? If we like what they say, we will support them, but if we do not, we despise them. We never look at anything without bias anymore.

It reminds me of professional wrestling or, as Vince McMahon once told the New York Gaming Commission, “Sports Entertainment.” We have a storyline, like the hero wrestler (face) vs the bad guy wrestler (heel), and we create the storyline to build up to an epic match that never ends fairly for the heel but always does for the face. Has our news just become entertainment with big costs to our actual country? Have we been duped by politics masquerading as heroes and heels in an overly dramatic script to drive viewers to this website or that network? Will you pick Hulk Hogan or the Ultimate Warrior? The Road Warriors or the Hart Foundation?

In this day and age, it is hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys by just tuning in a dial or by reading one newspaper. We must investigate ourselves using the one thing that is influenced the most by big money, and that is a search engine.

My advice is for you to dig in, yourself. Read from multiple sources and try and weed through the biased stuff and find facts among the follies. It can be done. We are coming to a pivotal moment in our current history. I challenge you to make choices based on facts, not propaganda. That in itself is very hard to do. I’m Jess saying… (Oh, I love you, Mom.)