There comes a time when one has to believe your eyes and if you can’t take your eyes to the scene you must believe the eyes of the credible people who are more like you than the propaganda machine we call the news. Clickbait is clickbait.  Many a fish in the stream has learned the danger of being baited.  The fish that are still in the water have figured out what to swallow and what to spit out.  The internet is a form of commercial fly fishing.  You cast out compelling headlines and reel in commercial revenue. The truth is reduced to the bottom line where profit is good and loss is bad.  But in times like this we have to decide what to believe and on what issues to seek credible reporting.  

I have a grand niece who admonishes me not to believe mainstream news.  Good advice in some ways.  But what really is mainstream news? The news industry is in disarray these days.  The public sources of news however have been labeled as destructive to the aspirations of the current industry called Congress and the executive Government of the United States. I would be willing to support PBS as an individual in a much larger way and was in fact waiting for the “rescue ask” when they announced they had to shut down.  PBS was never quite mainstream but its content is not linked absolutely to any revenue stream except the public dollar and donations . . . therefore likely credible.  The remaining networks are indeed like children in an intersection in a blinking yellow light looking both ways and wondering how badly they will be injured by the truth. 

A Modest Proposal for Good

Perhaps the best we can do in this era is never rely on a sole source, but scan for credibility in news reporting. Are children starving in Gaza? The reporters there who risk their lives daily say yes and send pictures to demonstrate. That seems credible. The shock news jocks, who sit in small rooms with headphones reading sources from other shock news jocks seem for less credible as they want to deny the pictures of scenes they haven’t the nerve or courage to get near. The major networks right now are under tremendous pressure to comply with the administration’s designated trance of news, and yet deliver, if shallowly, some credible news. If you follow only liberal or conservative points of view in your news feeds you are likely avoiding some aspect of the truth you fear. The idea that you could watch one network, or listen to one radio commentator, or read one confirming editorial writer is over. To quote the songwriter for Passenger, when it comes to truth you are ‘searching diamonds in a pile of coal’. Finding the diamonds is good. Scan the news and search for hard eyed first person, courageous credibility.