Dave, you give voice to a vast undercurrent of frustration that many have been shouting about. With all the technology that is communication based, the ease with which we stay in touch with vastly more people on our path through life than any other generation ever has (I mean really, before each stage of life pretty much partitioned your friends and life. You graduate HS, okay stay in touch with your HS buddies for a few years, then lose touch. Time in the military or college — same thing…get married = new group of friends, lose touch with your single ones…etc….NOW, you are probably FB friends with people you literally have not seen in decades and unless you are going to a reunion, have very little probability of ever seeing again in person).

Yet, with all the communication technology, responsible news reporting has gone down in quality. Amazing, really, when you consider the amount of data they now have access to. There used to be a vetting system, now any refinement of raw data is not for vetting but to spin it toward a bias appealing to a target audience (which then just reinforces their predisposed view of the world).

You mentioned the live streaming of the MN shooting. Any unnecessary shooting by police should be scrutinized. Police brutality should be excised. However, Police are AMERICAN citizens too, they are also entitled to due process, some presumption of innocence, but in a flash the officer was convicted by the public AND the Governor — without his side of the story, without some investigation to corroborate of deny the girlfriend’s side of the story. One law I learned in combat operations: FIRST INTEL is ALWAYS wrong. Nothing prevents one from PREPARING to act on that intel, but ALWAYS ALWAYS check it. Nuances ALWAYS appear and sometimes those nuances are life saving. Funny how people don’t seem to understand that, despite the oft repeated “don’t rush to judgement”….

I really wish it was not so fatiguing to find generally reliable news. It seems that on important news, one has to go to multiple sources and decide where the center of mass of reporting is. I sign up for a lot of news apps that give raw initial data of stories — many of those stories never make the national psyche, but wow -you see just as much from the news that has ‘legs’ as what doesn’t get picked up. The one data point I see is that EVERY DAY there is a life or death event concerning police officers…EVERYDAY. The vast majority — almost universally all — never pick up national legs because it is not newsworthy that only ONE cop was killed during a traffic stop or a shoot was on an uncontested criminal.