Take it from someone who spent more than 25 years in radio and television news—-you can't always believe what you read in print, hear on the radio or see on television.  

The media has been known to get the facts wrong on occasion—to jump the gun before checking all of their sources.  Let me tell you about the time I worked at a station and we identified a photo of a black man as a murder suspect.  But guess what?  He was actually the victim of a hit and run accident.  Family and friends of the deceased called us expressing their outrage over our coverage.  How could this have happened?  Because someone let the picture go through without double-checking.  

The same goes for the presidential election.  When Ashley Todd accused a black man of attacking her because of her support for the McCain-Palin ticket, Fox News jumped all over it and was ready to incite a riot!  It was big news for 24 hours—until Todd's story started to unravel and it was learned she was lying.  

Now the misinformation is getting worse with so-called citizen journalists who post stories on their blogs with bits and pieces of information and no attribution.  During the primaries I read a blog post where the writer called Obama a racist.  The writer said Obama didn't like white people.  Who was his source?  The Founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, David Duke.  Duke who was quoted calling Obama “a racist individual,” citing his Afro-centric Chicago church.    That blog post received dozens of comments—mostly from people who thanked the blogger for uncovering this piece of news that the "mainstream media" was trying to cover up.

If you really want to be informed, you owe it to yourself to read more than one newspaper; listen to more than one news broadcast and stay away from bloggers who have no background in reporting news.