I'll keep my sources to things which at least attemp to be factual instead of having a child like simplicity where their thinking on a subject stops at the point where the subject makes sense to them.
Fair enough, Charlie. You’ve given a slew of sources you reject and one you use, but what are the others? Unless we know those you regularly use it is hard to determine their veracity.
What we are suffering from at the moment, in my opinion, is that we as a species haven’t yet come to terms with the internet. Its power and influence might take another couple of generations to fully integrate itself into our civilisation. I’m holding in my hand a device that is not only playing me Radio 4 while I’m on a train into London, it is allowing me to communicate directly with you instantaneously and, oh, by the way, when I press send, I can, if I wish, immediately access the entire accumulated knowledge of the whole of human history for free. The magnitude of that advance is still stunning. No wonder we can occasionally struggle.
Along with its brilliance however comes advantages and disadvantages which depend on you personal beliefs. If Fox News told me the sky was blue I would instinctively look out the window to check. The thing is, and here’s the rub, it’s bec9me ever more clear through Brexit, then Trump, and the advance of parties such as the AfD in Germany, that news sources with hitherto unblemished reputations are at it too. When Jon Sopel tells me on BBC News every night what a terrible human being Donald Trump is - and he does - I think to myself, “Jon, that’s your opinion. You’re paid to tell me the news, not what you think of the news.” This ever less subtle change in the way our news is presented to us is driving people away from partisan halfwits like Sopel, Don Lemon or Greg Gutfeld and off into the recesses of the internet, a medium still in its infancy. There are many reasons I love my girlfriend. One of them, and I’m not joking, is she thinks the earth is flat, and not only can she espouse irrefutable evidence over several hours if pushed she also dreams, should we be blessed, of home schooling our children. Yeah, right, that’ll happen.
It’s easy for the talking heads on the news channels to point at the internet as the problem, but they need to look closer to home. Rolling news is the problem. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that they can be first, they can be fast and they can be factual, but rarely can they be all three at the same time. As I’ve said here before it is the single most dangerous invention of the 20th Century, and I include the AK47 and the hydrogen bomb.
