Okay. I’m a news junky of the past age. For decades, I’ve wanted to stay in touch with the world around me.
That said, life today is not like it was when I was young. There’s no Walter Cronkite voice speaking over the airwaves to help us comprehend what was happening. The voice we trusted, and the report we were sure was factual. Trust, a bygone commodity?
There was a time when Houston had a morning and evening newspaper, and I subscribed to both. A lot of wasted paper? Sure. But this was before the World Wide Web existed. We commonly call this the internet, but had little knowledge of it before AOL days.
Speaking of, if you remember AOL, CompuServe, and dial-up modems, then you know the beginning of our WWW existence. The internet already existed, but you had to access it with a lot of typed commands. No GUI (Graphical User Interface) existed. Just white, green, or burnt orange words on varying shades of black. There are no pictures or fancy schmancy graphics. Not much different than a dumb terminal.
Today’s news comes from untrusted and untested sources. Make it up as you go along, and let your corporation set the tenor of the report instead of stating facts.
There is a movie line that keeps coming back to my mind:
‘Martin, you won’t know who to trust.”
If the key “too many secrets” talks to you right now, then you may know the reference. If not, that’s okay. The truth of this day comes from never knowing if the report/reporter is trustworthy or if some agenda is being presented to get more on their side of their “facts.”
Joe Friday famously said, “Just the facts, ma’am/sir, just the facts.” Buried in the reporting are facts, but the summation of an emotional approach, a slanted view, or out-and-out lies?
You don’t know who to believe!
AI (Artificial Intelligence) is making us dumber while our creative skills skyrocket. We can fake it, get everyone rowdy, and lift the groundswell of anger in just a few minutes!
In the world of Reels, Shorts, and fake reporting, we are captivated by the short take on life. No news. Just entertainment, let’s find the entertaining flavor of the month.
I hanker for a time of hungering for details and finding a trusted voice to speak and write the truth.
I turn to my Bible. I may not understand the vagaries of the past, but it’s what’s been given to me… trust it.
“Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him.”
Proverbs 30:5, NKJV
