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Webster, can you elaborate, please? It seems that you know your history, but I don't understand where you would like us to be. What would you like to see in the future and what do you suggest for the press to evolve into more of a benign force for good in our society?
No one should be allowed to go on TV or radio and spout outright LIES.
When 60 courts rule the election was fair, for example, and then Fox, Trump, Limbaugh etc go on social media, tv etc and say "the election was stolen" or rigged, THAT should not be allowed!
Especially not when that LIE is used to foment an insurrection on our Capitol!
I'm so glad that Facebook is finally fact-checking the millions of fake-news posts (meme's) and overlaying them with a warning that they're inaccurate. So many of them are invented by teenagers in Macedonia (Eastern Europe) who then get a kickback for every time it's shared (according to the Wall Street Journal).
It only takes a few seconds to fact-check rumors, but people just won't do it. So many of these fake stories get circulated literally tens of millions of times - (both on E-mail, and Facebook) and just never die. Some of them continue to be circulated after 15 to 20 years. And it's scary that millions of U.S. voters base their decisions on the very survival of our country, on misinformation that's not even true.
Like, the one I see constantly circulated about the "history of changes to the social security system" - Hell, the official Federal SSA Website itself, says that those claims aren't true, and it explains in detail, why - so what more proof do you need - and yet people have continued to spread the rumor for the past 20 years.
And the facebook "Meme" in 2016, claiming that Pope Francis was ordering all his followers to vote for Donald Trump. Sheesh, the Pope had just issued a 40,000 word encyclical message on the importance of caring for the environment -- something that Trump diametrically opposed (saying that global warming was a hoax). That Meme was traced back to a teenager in Macedonia.
The E-mail and Meme saying that guards at Arlington's Tomb of the Unknown soldier live underneath the Tomb all year, and give up watching TV or drinking alcohol the rest of their lives. Give me a break - That one's been circulating for nearly 20 years, and the official Arlington cemetery website dissects it point-by-point, and explains why it's false. Yet it still gets circulated by supposedly intelligent people.
Last edited by slowlane3; 02-25-2021 at 08:07 PM..
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