•July 5, 2017•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

As I walked recently on a country road past Herb Rucker’s place, Herb came out to chat. Politics was on his mind.

“Jim, what in the world am I to believe, and who should I believe?” I didn’t know if “fake news” was on Herb’s mind though there was a good chance as 75 percent of folks in my Stark County voted for Trump.

Then this past week, I had lunch with three friends who are active in the nearby Bureau County Tea Party. Two of the three told me, in effect, they didn’t believe any news that was critical of President Trump. Their trust in the media was about nil. Worrisome.

It is important that in a democracy we have a decent level of trust in the information we get about the world around us.

Life is, after all, about information, literally. Yet we witness personally only the tiniest slice of what goes on in the world around us. From what others tell us, we build the pictures in our heads of our version of reality.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.