Anything that isn’t true is fake news, right?  Some might refer to it as stretching the truth with innuendo or rhetoric.  Some may perceive it as all out lies and deception.  With the introduction of the Internet, most people have become used to seeing instant news and believing whatever they read without checking out the resources.  In fact, the old time reporting of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley was assumed to be accurate.  Was it?

When I graduated from high school, my hope was to go to college to learn how to be a journalist.  It was a time when things were changing radically.  The magazines and newspapers were revered because of their investigative reporting.  They dug deeply for the facts and most likely they were accurate.  With the speed of passing that news through the airwaves and into peoples’ homes via television, we thought we were being fed a diet of truth when we watched the news. So, is “Fake News” something that just got started in the last several years?  The National Enquirer was founded way back in 1926 as a proving ground for new ideas.  It made its way into grocery stores as a tabloid magazine and has tickled the curiosity of shoppers for a long time. Thinking back in history when there wasn’t mass media, there was still word of mouth and, like the old game of telephone tag, the original message often got lost in translation.

As long as humans inhabit the earth there will be deception.  We need to do our own research. Relying on fact checking on the internet is almost like reading more of the same.  It has come to a point in our history, that we cannot rely on the Internet to give us the truth.  Everything we read or hear needs to be checked out for the truth.  Maybe I’ll finally become the journalist I once dreamed of being.  In the meantime we are bound to be lambasted with fake news, because the devil is still alive and active.  We are the ones who need to question everything and see if it adds up.

There is only one resource that is blameless and that’s God’s Word, the Bible.  We can count on every word being true because God inspired each one of them. It can help us to be discerning, wise, faithful and perceptive.  It will also show us the way to perfection.

THANK YOU, JESUS, FOR YOUR TRUTH!