And That’s The Way It Is…

By Liberalchik

Remember when facts were facts and lies were lies?

We have a serious problem in this country, rampant misinformation. Pitting brother against brother, family against family, friend against friend, what we have here is a telecommunications civil war.

This civil war has created a divide in our country that may never mend. It’s too vast and too personal. No one wants to say, I was wrong, I was deceived. It’s deeper than political leanings, it’s bordering on psychosis, a giant national social psychosis.

Thanks to 24 hr cable news, the internet, twitter and facebook, there is no one central information system that ALL Americans can agree on as where we get our facts. Every day things happen, every day news happens, but depending on what source you use, the reporting of events is wide and varied.

In the past, in the good ol’ days there was the evening news. At 6 pm the family gathered around the TV for Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley to inform the public of what happened that day. There was one set of facts. And everyone agreed, yes this happened today. Maybe Democrats and Republicans were at odds in their reaction to these facts, but they still accepted facts as facts. Everyone had one jumping off point on which to base a RATIONAL discussion. Discourse is good, discourse is healthy, but it is only possible when all parties start with the same information accepted as fact.

We’ve always had the lunatic fringe who was recognized and dismissed AS the lunatic fringe, the 3 am radio crowd who in dark corners of the country whispered and reassured each other their madness was not madness.

Now every nutcase and conspiracy theorist has their own news source (see Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, etc.) to confirm their paranoia and now these nutcases (see Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, etc.) are running for office and WINNING.

The lunatics are running the asylum.

In an effort to bridge the gap and restore oneness of information, we have fact checking organizations who do nothing but try to give the public what it needs to be sane, the facts. Snopes.com and Factcheck.org are two of the most reputable, but in this time of misinformation, even they are scorned as ‘liberal’ leaning. The reason Snopes.com is more often accused of bias by conservatives than by liberals is that facts have a notoriously liberal bias. Facts are facts and lies are lies.

Stephen Colbert was right. And that’s a fact.