News and Drinking Kool-Aid...Who's right? Who's wrong? Facts? Half-truths? Hard to keep up.

I have been accused of drinking the Kool-Aid and the assumption leads where ever my political bent leans. What can you say when I don’t believe either side, only a portion of what I see and little of what I read.

This is the era we live in: an excess of information, half-truths, political bias and a desperate need for ratings, gaining followers, getting shared. Fake headlines; once restricted to a media with bias now has been commandeered by national and international private entities seeking hype.

It used to be the outlandish headlines sold rag papers; Aliens have kidnapped Elvis, a woman has a monkey baby. These headlines were assumed for entertainments’ sake and no one reasonable would take them as fact. It now seems like rag and true journalism have become often indiscernable.

The mainstream media, takes initiative to bring you the story before it is even a story with a  goal to be first at any cost. Truth becomes assumed, placeholders to fill the 24 hour news cycle until the details of the story become available.

Giving up it’s old standard of getting all of the facts straight, the media developed it’s own latitude of not only filling in the blanks for you but explaining only what you need to know. When you show old pictures of a person for emotional fodder or only use words for the impact of your viewers, the story has become propaganda instead of truth.

Our news has become much like the prosecution and the defense on either side making their point by only showing a piece of the whole story.  On either side the rabid viewer digests what they insist are facts while calling the other side fools and misguided, drinking the Kool-Aid.