Letter to the Editor of Chicago Tribune

They didn’t publish this or didn’t yet anyway so I thought I would.  The title of the letter was “The history of editorializing and fake news.”

Dear Editor,

 

Our Electoral College was set up by our founding fathers with the purpose of representing the electorate.  As newspapers were not readily available to anyone but the upper class in the 1770s and 1780s, the principle behind it was representing an uninformed electorate.

 

The point with this is, in this day where all media is readily available on any device, we still do not have an informed electorate.  Fake news dominates, telling us what is nice to know, not NEED to know.  Also, when we do hear a story we are no longer given it straight, as in, “That’s the way it is.”.  We are subject to the conclusions drawn by the newscaster or columnist, apparently because we are not allowed or not intelligent enough to draw our own conclusions.

 

So my problem with this is, if we are to break the 24 hour news cycle and get the information we need to make intelligent decisions, we must take our news with a heavy grain of salt.  We must believe we are smart enough to comprehend the issue beyond what is forced down our throats.