With desktop publishing programs anyone can print anything they like, and have it appear professionally done, and with coping machines available for just a few hundred dollars, and Kwik-Kopy type stores all over town, it is very easy for someone to publish total drivel. Does this mean that everything printed on paper is worthless? Of course not. It mearly means that the reader must exercise some degree of judgement in evaluating what they read.

With the prolifiation of Web Page building programs, and with most ISPs making a web page available for free to customers who have a monthly internet access account with them, it is even easier for someone to publish on the web than through the local copy store. This means it is easier for a brilliant mind to publish gems of wisdom, and it is easier for less brilliant minds to publish total drivel. The reader must exercise judgment in evaluating what they read.

The wonderful thing about the Internet is that with a little bit of work with the Search Engines, a discerning reader can identify sites with many different points of view on a particular matter, and rather than viewing one site, and trying to come to a conclusion as to whether that site is telling the truth or not, a person can look at many different sides of a question, and form his or her own opinion on the matter.

Not everyone does this. Certainly retired veteran ABC newsman Pierre Salinger did not when he took a bogus story he got off the Internet and bought it hook, line and sinker about the Navy being responsible for the July 17 explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the Long Island coast. Other foolish examples of false information being spread on the internet include the time when the San Jose Mercury News wrote an article which some felt suggested that the CIA had been involved selling crack cocaine in California inner city neighborhoods, and it was picked up and copied by a variety of political activists and widely reprinted on the Internet, replete with claims that it was the proof of the long-held suspicions among many people of government participation in inner-city drug sales. Another equally foolish example was following the Oklahoma City bombing when newsgroups and web sites were filled with accounts of black helicopters, enemy troops secretly massing on the U.S. borders with Mexico.

But if people reading information on the internet will seek corroberation before they accept something as TRUE, and if web publishers will help seekers of corroberation by providing links to sources they used in reaching the conclusions they reached, the internet can be an invaluable tool in expanding knowledge and information in the 21st century.

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