Newsflash

"Redditors are morons! News at eleven!"

Okay, that's not exactly a newsflash, I grant you. But here's a good read about how the delusional mouth-breathers on so-called social websites, internet forums and meta-sites managed to turn the search for the Boston bombers into a digital witch hunt.

All it took was a couple of hours for high-school sophomore Salah Barhoum to have his entire world turned upside down. Up until that point, he was best known for being a standout athlete. But suddenly, through no fault of his own, he was being followed by strange men convinced that he was responsible for the heinous bombings at the Boston Marathon that happened just days earlier. The FBI had not named any suspects yet, but his face was already on the cover of the NY Post, labeled as a person of interest.

Unfortunately for Barhoum, and well over a dozen others, they were the victims of shoddy detective work – their identities were broadcast publically while they were accused of crimes they had nothing to do with and maligned by the national media as terrorists. In reality, Barhoum and others were not even being investigated by the authorities involved with the case. Instead, they had been outed by anonymous commenters on Reddit and 4Chan, who believed they were guilty based upon their clothes and appearance. What started as an atypical request by the FBI to gather evidence from the public quickly morphed into a much uglier digital witch hunt, one where the crowd’s fears, prejudices, and suspicions were given credence, while guilt and innocence were doled out based on shreds of circumstantial evidence.

The lesson here is obvious: assume that pretty well everyone on an internet forum is a basement dweller nursing a massive inferiority complex and entitlement ego -- because that's exactly what they are, especially at places like Reddit and 4Chan. The denizens of such sites, which range from merely leftist to outright anarchist, are usually the first to call for gun control and reductions in law enforcement capabilities. But give them a chance and their true natures show through.

Enough of that. I'll waste no more time discussing the mentally impotent. Of greater interest was this paragraph from the article:

The traditional media could play an enormously valuable role here by separating fact from fiction and providing verified, trustworthy information. Instead, most outlets just repeated false claims made online — providing a megaphone to statements that should never seen the light of day in the first place.

That has become a pattern for network news outlets over the last decade. They have all but abandoned journalistic principles and written off their "fourth estate" responsibilities in favor of sensationalism and activism. It's gone beyond an annoyance; it is now becoming a major problem.

Currently, televised news shows are simply harbors for ridiculous buffoons. But if the trend continues uninterrupted, they will gradually morph into something like cultural oligarchs, (really, really stupid oligarchs), menacing our society and the Republic -- or what will be left of it at that point, anyway. The solution? Don't watch network television, especially news shows. If you do, you're part of the problem. It's like complaining about illegal immigration, then hiring illegal immigrants to mow your lawn. It is past time the alphabet channels went away, but the only way that will happen is if we as a nation stop feeding them.