In the Internet Age, Maybe Speed Has Made The News Too Stupid To Trust

We have evidence of that twice this week. 

And this probably tells us more about how we're thinking in general.

The first such instance was when Buzz Feed reported that investigation had revealed that President Trump told his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie. 

The news regarding the Trump investigation and those surrounding Trump has been such a blizzard of stuff recently that this frankly sounded credible. But the fact, quite frankly, that Buzz Feed was the revealing source made it so that we should have all held back our judgment a bit.  As it was, the Mueller investigation denied that story about day later. That investigation doesn't seem to leak, so the denial was pretty convincing.

And then there was the entire Covington Catholic High School thing in which everyone rushed in, based on a Twitter item, to condemn the students, the condemnation made all the more enjoyable as it gave bashers the chance to use the term "Catholic" again and again.

Well, turns out that story was pretty much off the mark as well and it was more the case that they were being harassed and not the other way around.

All of this suggest that minor fact is now morphed into sensationalized baloney so fast now that we're loosing the ability to really report serious news.  This has been a problem in general ever since television became the primary means of reporting the news, but now its become absolutely chronic in the age of the Twitter snippet.

Moreover, as the second story now suggests, we're now so ready to be offended in support of our popular cause de jour that we've really reached the level of the absurd.

All of which is distressing.  A nation that can't even report serious news seriously is in serious trouble.

Perhaps this offers a bit of hope actually, although I doubt it.  One of my highly let wing friends who normally wouldn't have any problem participating in a bashing, particularly if bashing Catholics was in the offering, took to the net and complained of the story having "legs" and being meritless.  Sort of confronted by her own politics, I noted that she took to defriending somebody due to being so confronted.  The point is that if those who normally feel free to take extreme positions based on little information are now complaining about it, on the right and the left, maybe they'll all stop doing it.

But probably not.