Hello and welcome to the Sensibly Speaking Podcast, brought to you on iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play as well as here on YouTube with video. With Black Friday just having ended and Christmas season now upon us, I want to first plug my Critical Merchandise site, which has a slew of fun and informative designs that I think some of you might want to check out as gift-giving ideas. The link is in the description box below, shop.spreadshirt.com/chrisshelton and the commissions I earn from that help support me and my channel so I can continue bringing you this amazing and awesome content.

Speaking of which, this week I’ve put together a whole lot of good information for you about the media and how to do a little critical thinking about your news sources. We’ve been seeing seeing a lot of articles and news this past week or so about the subject of fake news and whether or not it influences our elections or other parts of our lives. Well, the obvious answer is “Yes, of course it does” but it may be debatable as to whether this factor alone is responsible for who we put in office.

I wanted to talk about this, though, because you can’t be very sensible or smart in your decisions if you are operating on false or misleading information. In other words, garbage in, garbage out. So let’s get down into some deep and gory details about this, huh?

News – what is it?

News is information about current events. The word itself is simply the plural of “new” and the idea of spreading what’s new has been around probably since we first started communicating. News was originally broadcast through word of mouth but with the invention of printing presses we started printing papers that had news on them and as our ability to communicate farther and faster has vastly improved since then with the invention of radio, television, computers and the internet. Now any piece of information you want to know can be transmitted at nearly the speed of light around the world in mere seconds.

As the potential has risen to get more and more information faster and faster, we as individuals are often in a position of sensory and data overload. Our ability to intake and comprehend information has not evolved at the same rate as our communications systems. At this point, it is simply impossible for any one of us to gain a fully comprehensive understanding of every subject known to man, or even a small percentage of those subjects. Science, industry and war have pushed our imaginations and innovation forward at a rate unprecendented at any earlier time in our history.

Yet if we can’t keep up with this as a whole, if we can’t keep our fingers on the pulse of what is going on and have an accurate and fairly good understanding of our immediate and distant environments, we can’t tell where we are going or how we are going to get there. In other words, to the degree we are misinformed is the degree we will make bad judgements or choose the wrong path for our life. So we have to figure out how to catch up with what’s happening and we have to know how to do this quickly and easily.

Development of News and Information Media

Let’s talk about the development of newspapers and news media organizations. I think a big picture, long-term view of this is important to understand that the problems we are facing with news today are nothing new. In fact, I was surprised at some of what I found looking deeper into this history.

People have always been curious about what’s going on around them. Once we started gathering into villages, towns and cities, systems were setup to get information, whether it was as simple as people asking travelers what was going on over the hill to establishing specific places where news would be spread, such as the Greek forum and Roman baths or, later English coffeehouses, Islamic mosques,