“The Fine Print”, by Michael Schrader

Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction?

(Written and posted 8 August 2005)

Have you ever watched that show? It has become a Sunday night staple in the Schrader household. The kids and I keep a tally sheet of our guesses as we watch each story and try to figure out how well we can separate fact from fiction. Depending on how you look at the proverbial glass, I either do extremely well or extremely poor, as I consistently get three out of the five correct. Of course, I know going in that the stories may be fiction, so I pay extra attention, and I still only to be right sixty percent of the time. How badly do you think I would do if I didn’t know going in that what I was watching may not be true?

That is exactly what happens every day with what we call the “news”. There are many news items that are nothing more that mere fantasy. However, with the exponential proliferation of talk radio and blogs, these fantasies are being promulgated as facts, and are readily being accepted as such by a naïve and unsuspecting public. We must put a stop to this NOW!

This is why, after nearly two years of the cessation of this column, I have decided to come back. Of course, it helps that when I was at my high school reunion last fall, several of my high school chums commented about how they missed it. More importantly, though, it is time for those of us who are concerned about the truth to make a stand and make our voices heard.

I want to state out front that this column is not a blog and will never be a blog, so please don’t insult me like that. A blog is either: a personal weblog, like a diary if you will; or the rantings of a lunatic. (Sometimes both!) Don’t get me wrong—blogs do have their purposes and can be useful. However, they should not be considered objective sources of information, although many folk do.

It is not just the bloggers that are a problem. The right-wing talking heads on radio are also masters at spewing out venomous rantings that have no basis in reality and are, for the most part, dead wrong. We have a local talking head that is the king of misinformation, only relaying the information that supports his own personal political agenda and ignoring all contrary information. The scary thing is that many consider his word Gospel.

What we have is a very lazy and uneducated public, a public that doesn’t know what the truth is and doesn’t want to take to effort to find out what the truth is. They are sponges willing to soak up any misinformation presented to them for the sake of convenience. The problem comes when this same public parrots this misinformation as absolute truth. The lie becomes the truth, and the truth becomes the lie.

It’s not just the right that plays the misinformation game; the left plays it, too. Of course, the left is even more deceptive by cloaking their misinformation under the banner of mainstream media outlets. It was hard not to believe CBS News about the forged Bush memos; after all, it was the venerable CBS News. The same holds true with Newsweek and the story about the Koran-flushing toilets. (I have finicky toilets, so I’d love to have one strong enough to flush a book. Of course, I’d have to worry about the kids falling in!)

In the dozen years that I have written this column, I have always attempted to ensure that what I was saying was true by doing thorough research on my facts. Yes, I do present them from a certain point-of-view. (Libertarian, for the most part) Sometimes I agree with what I write, and sometimes I don’t. The purpose of this column has never been to promulgate my opinion; instead, it has always been to bring out points-of-view that normally might never be considered. I want to make you think about issues so that you can make informed decisions about them.

Unfortunately, thinking and informed decisions are quickly on the way to extinction.

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