Wonderings and Ponderings

"Only believe half of what you see and none of what you hear".  Who grew up being told that by their Elders?  "Hey, Mom, Angie said that Jonie said that Jenny's mom wears men's underwear!"....Yeah, we all had to learn the hard way.

But I always trusted the News.  I believed that what they told me were facts.  Not hearsay, not personal opinions, not creative spins.  If the entire story wasn't known - it wasn't told.  And maybe I've been wrong all along - but I think that when Walter Kronkite signed off each night with "and that's the way it is" I felt like I had been told the truth.

With technology, you would imagine, comes intelligence. The more I am exposed to, the more information I can get my hands on, the more I will know.  But the more I blog, the more I search for interesting, fun, different, extreme news I'm understanding more and more how hard it is to trust what is touted as fact.  I see a news story and Swag it (SwagBucks search engine) and I might read seven different articles that have different information.  I've tried to research historical figures only to find one website that says one thing - three others that say the exact opposite.  In this world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., we are constantly being updated with new information - all of which people are posting and re-posting as facts, and getting outraged or excited or arguing about it.   It's sad to say, but most of it is untrue or a portion of information taken out of context.

Television/Cable News stations are like watching either bad reality TV or crime dramas.  The snippets of 'news' that tease you into watching their newscasts are over-dramatized and incredibly misleading.  The Newspapers have headlines that make you think one thing, only to find as you read along that it is the exact opposite.  Most editorials are now called fact instead of personal opinion.

It's a shame.  And as many opinions as I have about this - I have zero solutions.  I just have to try harder to root out the truth, believe only half of what I see and none of what I hear, and question everything and everyone. 

And that's the way it is, Tuesday, March 29th, 2011.