The more information we have access to the less we seem to actually know.
My dad was right when he called television "the idiot box," and that was back in the 60's. If television contributed greatly to the dumbing down of America, then today's 24/7 news cycle created by the cable news networks and the Internet insta-news sites, must surely be behind the murder of America.
Leaving aside the complete travesty of truth, justice, and the American way, that is the Shirley Sherrod story, I can't help but wonder what our country would be like today had we had cable news and the Internet back in the 1950's McCarthy era. Would McCarthy have leaked doctored photos and documents to the Drudge Report? Would the Huffington Post have run photos of the 10 most hottest blacklisted babes?
Can you imagine if Orson Welles had presented his "War of the Worlds" radio program on the Comedy Central channel? It would have been picked up by Fox News as "breaking," and spread like wild fire across the nation. Instead of the debatable panic the radio show may have caused, there would be real panic, since everyone would be reporting it as a true account of what was actually happening in some field in N. J.
Thank God, JFK didn't have to deal with Breitbart during the Cuban Missile Crisis. All he merely had to do was talk Time magazine out of reporting the story before he could address the nation. Had Breitbart been around then, there might not be a today today.
But, thankfully we moderns are more sophisticated than that and we know how to process the real from the fake. Thank goodness we don't let our partisan prejudices get in the way of the truth. Thank goodness it is always the other guy who is at fault. Our side isn't playing "gotcha" politics, we are merely pointing out where the other side is playing that destructive game. And this time we've got them good!