Its Time For the Media to Take Responsibility... I'm Looking at You, Facebook Friend

It happened again, a stupid statement was made in my presence and I couldn't hold back. I opened my big mouth and responded. I can help it. Stupid stuff drives me crazy.

Who is the real truth-teller?

A coworker informed me that he can't use Snopes.com anymore because they are funded by some political organization.
Really.
He honestly said that.
I looked at him dumbstruck, insisting he couldn't be serious.
"Well, where do you think they get their money?" He shot back.
All that advertising. They get so many clicks they could ask anything they want and get it.
"Do you honestly trust Snopes?" Was his next question.
I had to tell him I don't. The simple fact is that I trust no one. Zilch. Nada. I don't believe a word anyone tells me, and, honestly, I don't see how you can trust anyone yourself.

There was a time when the American public could sit in their living rooms and listen to the radio or watch the TV and expect truth. You could grab a paper and read through their headlines, and generally expect the facts would be in certain sections while pure opinion and speculation lived in its own page or two. Those days are gone. News today is more likely a few facts mixed with opinion and rumor.

The Colonial Version of Facebook

The current information age reminds me of the days of old when the only printed objects in the pioneer home would be the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress. News or current information was hard to come by, and the traveling peddler would bring a welcome change and a chance at news. Of course everyone knew that the peddler would tell whatever tale he could to keep your attention long enough to sell you something, but some news was better than nothing at all so people would be willing to risk the misinformation for the chance at getting anything. I can imagine when the man of the house came home after the visit from the peddler the family would spend hours trying to tease the truth out of all the tales told by the traveler. Imagine what it must have been like for all the rumors to develop when all these people living so isolated came to town for the rare visit and all the stories collected through the year were disseminated and dissected along with whatever out of date newspaper made it to the outpost to help everyone figure out where the truth really fit. I'm sure some things believed to be true never even happened. I couldn't blame them back then for believing untruths. They were at the mercy of travelers and their imaginations.

Fast forward to today and things are so much the same and so much different. I remember when I first learned to use a Boolean search with Lycos.com or Excite.com to find exactly what I wanted to find. My first big urban legend to bust using these tools was the silly Betty Martini article on Aspartame that was being passed around by email. I tackled crazy rumors about vaccines and then found myself a friendly ally in Snopes.com, which was a bulky website that took a little bit of skill to navigate in the early days, but focused more on the "why" of all these false rumors than the "what" was really true. Those were the fun days. Someone would include me in some stupid forwarded email chain with a "breaking news" story that "the media" wouldn't share, and I would do a quick search and respond with a link to a Snopes article or write a little note of my own showing the research I did to disprove the rumor. It didn't take long for those forwards to get to my wife's email, but never make it to mine. No one likes to look stupid.



Now the peddler with the rumors for anxious ears roams the internet, and misinformation abounds. The purpose of the peddler remains the same- to get your eyes to hover long enough to buy whatever they are selling. Back in the pioneer days it may have been tin, but now it is advertising dollars and, even more frightening, ideology. My social media of choice is Facebook simply because my side of the family shares their news and pictures there, but I see so much junk there too. One thing that did happen all over Facebook during this election was the sharing of misinformation, partly because so many of my friends insisted that they could not trust "The Media" to tell the truth. In the meantime a large number of sites popped up to fill the void. I caught one sloppy site in the act of creating itself, writing a bogus article about one of the candidates. I identified the site as a bogus one almost instantly, but then it began to populate its pages with news stories copied from other sites to make it look older and more legitimate than it really was. People like me who hunt urban myths for fun couldn't keep up with the deluge of purely false news pages that clone real-sounding pages simply to harvest clicks, and even legitimate news sources followed the clicks and reposts on social media and began sharing the bogus sites themselves. 
You probably expect me to now rant about how you need to stop clicking those wasteful sites to protect the sensibilities of people like me, but no. THAT is not my point. If it entertains you to give money to stupid click-bait sites then do it, and go ahead and repost the links so your friends can get sucked in. What really bothered me was that no one took responsibility for all the junk being spread. Hello fellow American! You can't blame the media for anything anymore! If I can prove a website false by doing a Google search in ten seconds you can check your own stuff too. Back when the media was our only source of information we could blame the media for not letting us know the truth, but now we can fact-check just about everything that pops up with archives that stretch back decades. 
What I learned from this election cycle is that our media companies are not in the information business, but advertising, and those who are the most outlandish get the most free advertising. So what was your job, friend? It was the same as mine, to research and share the truth. What often happened instead? my social media feed was filled with people reposting things that agreed with their ideology though the facts were wrong or twisted. Out of hundreds of friends I had only eight upon whom I could depend to post thoughtful links that were factually correct. The rest only posted stuff that seemed right, but was never checked to be factual. 
It is time for the American public to take responsibility. You are now "The Media". In fact it is pretty obvious to the objective viewer that no one watches your clicks and reposts more than the very "media" you vilify. If it trends on Facebook or Twitter, by golly, it will be on the news tonight. Who is responsible for all the misinformation on Trump and Clinton? You are. Why didn't we have better candidates for which to vote? A big part was because you guys wouldn't stop talking about the idiots on your social media feed. 
Its time to treat everything you are given on your social media feed like the pioneers did the peddlers of old. Use their information and stories to feed your curiosity, but don't let them suck you into their false narratives and lies. If you pass it on, check it out first. Right now, I simply can't trust you. I can't trust "The Media", remember? And you are the media.