THE INFORMATION AGE

The Information Age provides us with an abundance of information on issues, candidates, world events, etc. We have the traditional news media, the cable news programs, talk radio shows, and the Internet. The internet can be used for historical research, to follow conservative Blogs, liberal Blogs, political party web sites, and much more. The internet also gives us a way to get at the truth when a candidate, political party, or news program puts out erroneous information (and sometimes outright lies). We also have an abundance of books being published today that can help us sort out the truth about politicians who have been in office for many years, such as John Kerry and Edward Kennedy.

However, many of us do not take advantage of all this information. How many among us watch the network news, or read one of the long-established newspapers in the morning or evening, and use no other news source? I have found that network news programs and newspapers such as the Washington Post and New York Times are the poorest source of information when it comes to politics. They have been so liberal for so many years that they do not seem to have the ability to report the facts any more! Their stories are all too often slanted to favor the left. I have read the same story in both the Washington Post and the Washington Times and seen two different slants on the same story. The Post, for example, will change the title and maybe a few sentences, and thereby change the whole perspective of the story.

This same sort of thing happens with the Network News programs such as 60 Minutes. A good example of this is the 60 Minutes program on President Bush’s National Guard duty, which aired prior to the 2004 election. I refused to watch it because I have felt for a long time that 60 Minutes cannot be trusted to tell the truth. Why? Back in the early 1980’s, 60 Minutes visited a nuclear power plant in Ohio. At that time it was popular to be against nuclear power. The utility company in Ohio agreed to allow 60 Minutes to visit the site, and tape the utility’s side of the nuclear power controversy, if they would agree to provide the utility with an unedited copy of the tape. At that time I was working with Bechtel Power Corporation on a nuclear power plant in Michigan.

After the program aired on television, the utility and Bechtel made this unedited tape available to their employees. 60 Minutes had put a so-called expert on the air, and needless to say, during the show 60 Minutes and this “expert” exhorted very vocally against nuclear power. The “expert” had been previously proven in a court of law not to be an expert on nuclear power, but this information, and much else that would have discredited the show’s position, although in the unedited tape, had been completely left out of the program that appeared on TV!

So it is not surprising to me that the documents 60 Minutes showed on their program attacking the President’s National Guard duty were afterwards proved to be fraudulent. They distort the truth or even lie to support the side of a story or cause they support.

I prefer the cable Fox News program because they at least make an effort to put out both sides of a story. I also enjoy listening the Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh radio shows.