Replies

"...Well done. Can you imagine what the narrative would be like had this happened before the Internet? If all we had were the Big 3 to get us information?"

101ORD makes a great point. The dissemination of information used to be the nearly sole province of "Big Media".
. . . But we were a captive audience. And many people, no, MOST people trusted the media. They TRUSTED people like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather to tell us the truth, and assumed they did so. It was only with the passage of time that we could look dispassionately on that time, and realize just what took place.
The Internet has changed all that. Personally, I have not read a newspaper, read a magazine (such as Time or Newsweek) or watched a full news broadcast in nearly a decade. I consider myself far better informed than the majority of people I know.
But that comes with a price. With that freedom of not being beholden to Big Media comes responsibility...the responsibility of having to vet information myself and not depend on someone else (such as ABC, NBC, CBS, NYT, LA Times, Boston Globe, etc.) to do it for me. And this is sometimes not only difficult to do, it is occasionally impossible to do, and I am left with having to make a best guess. And not being infallible, I make mistakes in judgement.
This is where a site like Free Republic becomes invaluable. Here, there can be generally open discussion about an issue. Many different people can view the available evidence and with a multitude of perspectives (some useful and some not so useful) an issue can be attacked piecemeal and broken down, much like a bunch of people with hammers and chisels working on a gigantic boulder.
I have found that on FR, any opinion or theory, no matter how crackpot or politically incorrect, can be promoted by a poster. However, I have also found that if you have a point of view, it is not going to be simply accepted as another valid theory, but can and WILL be deconstructed by participants. It is done with experience, humor, anger, insight, ignorance, bias, prejudice and wisdom. What results is, if not a good handle on an issue, is a wider perspective on that issue.

. . . It is both critically useful and maddeningly frustrating to approach the issues this way, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Thank God for this forum.

The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .
It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith

Pure and simple, we come to FR to pool our “incredulity” so that we can muster enough skepticism to have a chance at attaining a modicum of wisdom.