A long time ago when machines didn’t handle all of the harvest work in the fields what you brought in was a crop you wanted and attached to it was a lot of stuff you wanted to throw out. The machines leave all that extra out in the fields today but then you had to sift through it all somehow and get rid of what was useless. While agriculture has moved beyond those days with automation it seems that news and even what passes now for journalism has moved back into an age that requires a lot of sifting and culling just to find what is really useful.

The recent University of Illinois basketball coach search and hiring provide an excellent example of how things just get a bit out of hand. While most (and unfortunately I can only claim “most”) of the mainstream media stayed true to journalistic standards and reported what they could confirm there were many Tweets, blogs and other online posts that amounted to nothing more than rumor or even outright fabrication by someone. Those took on an air of truth when so many people repeated them and added their own twist until many of the rumors were reported as news. There was apparently a lot of chaff mixed in with the good stuff in this process and there was a general (not universal) declaration that the process was terrible mostly based on what was reported in social media without any real fact check or confirmation. “Sources” were referred to with little real checking and the actual facts were buried in stuff that should have been left out in the field.

I am not free of the same eagerness to repeat what appears on the internet and over the airwaves so I am not just pointing a finger outward. We all need to slow down the process and stop the re-Tweet or publication of what we cannot source with fidelity. It is a whole new world and somehow we need to catch up with the farmers and get the chaff out of our crop more efficiently. Events might take their own course instead of an imaginary one created by those who purport to know much of what they do not.

Take it for what it’s worth.