Our Broken B.S. Detectors

I would like you to do a favor for me, you can do it real quick while you are listening to this. I want you to go inside your head and go to one of the closets you store your stuff in. You know, the closets where we all keep our memories, learned data, and all the useless information that won't generally help you in life except if you find yourself staring at Alex Trabek while you are a contestant on Jeopardy. Go to that closet and poke around until you find your BS detector and check to make sure that it is in perfect working order. If it happens to be busted, please go out and acquire one with all haste.

I know I'm being kind of flippant but it seems that there are a whole lot of people out there with non working BS detectors. A whole lot of people out there who read and saw fake news, took it for gospel and then paid it forward to their friends who did likewise. We are only now just starting to understand how truly pervasive fake news was during the recent elections.

In the first study of fake news that was conducted by Ipsos for Buzzfeeed news, the data gathered paints a rather sad and shocking fact when it comes to the consumption of fake news by the American electorate. The study finds that fake news headlines fool people about 75% of the time. It also finds that those who claim to be for the GOP, 84% percent rated fake news stories "very" or "somewhat very" accurate, significantly more than those on the left hand side of the aisle.

Because of the study I went back and read the more popular of the fake news stories to see how they might be mistakenly thought of as real news, stories such as "FBI agent suspected in Hillary e-mail leaks found dead in apparently murder-suicide" from the phony Denver Guardian website, "Donald Trump protester speaks out: I was paid $3,500 to protest", or my personal favorite "Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for President". The last one I remember well because I happen to be a catholic and any research at all about the current pontiff would tell you how wackadoo a story like that would be.

Let's cut through the crap and get to the heart of it.... How did we get here? How did we get to the point where a majority of the people buy into stories that are so malicious and ludicrous? Well let's start with a twenty five year war on the media. Year after year it has been thrown out there that the “Lame-Stream Media” can't be trusted and that at it's heart it is biased towards Republicans and Conservatives in general. There was and is a campaign to discredit such venerable institutions like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and well the list goes on and on. Print, TV, and now Online Media haven't helped themselves when they started embracing the tabloid-ish ethos of “It Bleeds, It Leads” and using more entertainment driven approaches to it's journalism. After years of this sort of attack on our media, sadly a certain amount of prestige and credibility have been lost. With credibility shaken, is it no wonder that the populace have turned to alternative sources for their news, sources that we have selected because they align with our own views. In too many instances when we start digesting what these alternate sources produce we are not getting news, we are getting propaganda. And that folks is where we are in danger.

Journalism and the news has always been a pillar and bulwark in this country, sacrosanct in that an informed people were essential to keeping true to the ideals of this great american democratic experiment. The News Media have played a vital role in helping to ensure against brazen governmental tyranny and those elected to public office who haven't had our best interests at heart. An example of this would be March 9^th, 1954 when at the height of the “Red Scare”, the House Of un-American Activities chaired by Joseph McCarthy were wreaking havoc by publicly humiliating american citizens with the broad brush specter of Communism or being a Communist sympathizer. Standing up to the bullying McCarthy was CBS News's Edward R. Murrow who called out McCarthy in his famous “See It Now” show and took him head on using McCarthy's own words to help end this mid 20^th Century witch hunt. Murrow could do this because he was trusted by the american people to give them the unvarnished, right down the middle self evident-ed truth. We need the Edward R. Murrow's, the Walter Cronkite's, Mike Wallace's, Peter Jennings's. Now more then ever we need them.

So Friends, with all these different sources, all claiming to be a beacon and paragon of truth, all coming at you at the speed of now, get out, dust off, and replace the batteries to your own BS Detector so you can reject fake news and take a more analytic look to what you see and hear. Cross reference with multiple sources and ask questions. For my own part, I have always said I unabashedly present my opinion on this show and what I do and will always do when we do “The Last 7 Days” segment is use the politicians and news maker's own voices so you know you're getting the straight poop. So use those BS Detectors liberally because I have a feeling they will be working overtime in the next four years.