Many people no longer trust major media outlets to give them valuable information - and they may never do so again.
John Chancellor said he could remember a time when arguments could be settled by government statistics. Today, nobody’s statistics can be trusted.
Everybody's saying, be skeptical of Wikipedia. That is true. They should also be skeptical of everything. We should all be critical consumers of the media.
Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.
Our willingness to believe the news is, in many cases, not entirely innocent.
And honestly, if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken.
If you watch a news channel, you wouldn't then say that that person who's watching the news channel thinks everything that the news channel puts out. You wouldn't think that.
I just think that the media is just making things up. I don't really pay attention.
The written tone and the spoken tone change and the reporters' disbelief in the veracity of the government spreads to the readers and the viewers.
I don't know what to believe in the mainstream media anymore. My instinct is to not believe any of it, and it's their fault.
Most people I've talked to are convinced that they're not getting valuable information from news media anymore. I'm not talking about tinfoil-hatters either, these are intelligent people who believe their news media has failed them.
I feel like the Internet needs to be disarmed in some way. There needs to be a philosophical undermining of the Internet. We take it too seriously and too literally. For a reference we go to Wikipedia, which is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. It's kind of beautiful - it's all the product of imagination; it's not reality at all.
To use a word I never thought I'd apply to myself, I've sort of become a Luddite with regard to information. Where everyone else is getting their Twitter feeds from 'The New York Times' and their 'Huffington Post' emails, I live in a little bit of a bubble.
The Internet is pushing us - in good ways and in bad - to realize that the official version of events shouldn't always be trusted or accepted without question.
No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
In that kind of environment, where there's so much skepticism about information that's coming in, we're gonna have to spend a lot more time thinking about how do we protect our democratic process.
Everything looks true written down. What you read in National Enquirer and News Of The World looks true written down.
We are not going to do ourselves any favors by buying into what's printed in newspapers.
