NEWS FORUM

WHAT IS THE VERITAS NEWS FORUM?
Veritas is the Latin word for truth, which is something increasingly rare thing these days. We are awash in rumors, fake news, propaganda, and conspiracy theories involving everything from religion to politics to public figures to current events. It’s as if our entire world has become one big daily edition of some lurid tabloid: unreliable, sensationalist, and chock full of mind-numbing yellow journalism.

This is mostly due to the Internet, which feeds us billions of bytes of information every moment of every day. There’s just too much of it available now to everyone. Unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to accurately (or thoughtfully) process it. Just enter any term in Google, and you’ll get back thousands of links to material ranging in quality from good to bad, true to false, fact-based to opinion-based, conservative to liberal, balanced to imbalanced, fair to unfair—even human to AI. And making this toxic mix even more poisonous are the many social media sites that relentlessly offer up a shockingly lavish buffet of absurd gossip, wild allegations, personal attacks, inflammatory memes, baseless opinions, delusional nonsense, hate-based rhetoric, and outright lies peddled as truths. It’s a hot mess. Then there are the millions of online participants who, like gasoline on a fire, magnify the flames by behaving like they’re an expert in just about everything: medicine, politics, religion, history, science, climatology, biology, criminology, and on . . . and on . . . and on. This is called the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a mindset wherein someone believes they know far more than they actually do. And, not surprisingly, those who know the least about a subject, are invariably the ones who shout the loudest about it, believing they know the most.

My hope is that this Veritas News Forum will help readers discover the real story (the truth) behind the stories and the topics making headlines. My perspectives and opinions will be rooted primarily in my having been a journalist, researcher, and author for more than 30 years. But, like everyone, I do have a personal history that will likely color—hopefully, to a minimal degree—my views. I’m a moderate non-denominational Christian (since 1979), who was raised Roman Catholic and who has voted as both a Republican and a Democrat. I’m also a Midwesterner, raised in America’s heartland, where I learned about both God and country from my father, a 20-year Navy veteran of the Korean War. My mother was a school administrator.

I love my Lord, I love my wife, and I love my life. I also love America. And I love truth, too, wherever it may be found—no matter how hard it is to find, how difficult it is to see, or how uncomfortable it is to accept.

TRUTH is TRUTH.
VERITAS est VERITAS.

As Fox Mulder said on The X-Files, “The Truth is out there.” Or, back in the real world, as Winston Churchill said: “Truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”