Separate time-tested media sources from false stories by nobodies

Regarding Victor Davis Hanson’s column, “Trump puts last nail into mainstream media coffin” column on Christmas Day: Scary – it’s so true.

When people wrote on paper to a few, and they were rather stupid, vicious, pathetic...or wonderfully insightful, it took time to move those words around. In that window of time, there was time to “fact-check.” Yes, Virginia, there are facts. Then it got geometrically faster for any idiotic remark to start around the place. Mass media made it worse by quoting tweets, which by definition are not news but opinion.

A tweet into the cloud is no more noteworthy than the remark made over the fence to the neighbor. Mass media/social media -- honor standards for quoting!

Will we learn how to separate the wheat (time-tested media with fact-based, researched material) from chaff (false stories by people who hope their lies resonate somewhere)? Will people learn quickly enough that the source of news is the most important? The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have established records for verifying.

Rush Limbaugh? Sorry, just vicious! While we are re-learning the art of wise discrimination parts of culture may get lost – just as it did in the pre-World War II Dark Ages. There are consequences to bad choices.

This story was originally published January 5, 2017 at 12:09 PM with the headline "Separate time-tested media sources from false stories by nobodies."