Life happens fast. Truth happens slow. Trust, well that's a rarething. Combining life, truth and trust is apparently animpossibility, especially when it comes to news today that's sharedon social media.

When the staff and reporters of CU Times create contentthat we share on our site and in our print issues, those storiesmake it into our social media feeds. It's pretty straightforward.When it comes to breaking news, we do two things: We speed up andslow down at the same time. What I mean here is by speeding up, wejump on the story. By slowing down, we stop and think and check thedetails before getting out the first version of the story. Sure,we'd like to be first with the news. But more importantly, we wantto be right. After that happens, we follow up with more details andfacts to add to the story to give to you, and then we post thoseupdates on social media. That's the process.

As many of you have noted and commented to us about CUTimes being fake news or a leftist rag, our staff consisting ofcostal elite media types and more since the November elections lastyear, I'm going to say it: You're being suckered into a false newsreality. There are a lot of people and situations to blame forthis. For my purposes here, I'm putting a lot of this on the headsof those who are running our social media platforms. And to thosepeople, I say (to borrow words, as I have before, from Earth, Wind& Fire), “Somethin' happened along the way, what used to behappy was sad.”

For years I've been a proponent of using social media as aneffective marketing tool and whatnot. And I was also blown away inthe social media early years of just how brilliant it was as ajournalist and news consumer to be so plugged in to breaking newsand insights from reporters working on the story. Back in the olddays, of 2009, you could have a straight and unfiltered view of thenews as it happened. Those days have been hijacked and so has mynews consumption. Therefore, I'm calling it quits on social mediafor any national or international breaking news. Instead, I'm goingto sit back and wait for the real information.

This decision is something I think others should consider andhere's why – the Las Vegas shooting and Tom Petty.

When news came through in the form of 10-plus alerts on my phonejust after midnight my time (I'm not a costal elite – I'm in theCentral Time Zone), it was a chaotic mess of information: “2 Deadin a Las Vegas Mall Shooting;” “Shots Fired at Las Vegas Casino;”“Country Music Festival-Goers Killed by Mass Shooter.” The newsalerts showed this evolution of chaotic first impressions of astory until the alerts eventually had the story correct. But then,the real social media madness took place. Shortly after thetragedy, the fake stories began to spread on Facebook, Twitter andeven Google. In fact, if you were paying attention to Facebook andGoogle during those hours after the shooting, you would havenoticed two of the top trending stories were fake – you just didn'trealize it.

“Las Vegas Shooter Reportedly a Democrat Who Likes RachelMaddow, MoveOn.Org and Associated With Anti-Trump Army.” This wasthe actual headline of the top story and it was completely false,yet it's very likely you or someone in your family shared thisstory. Why? Because we no longer control the news we see in oursocial media feeds – these big stories are constantly beingmanipulated by foreign forces. This is not a political statement,this is the reality we now live in with bots, trolls and hackersconsistently manipulating what we see and read. Later that morningafter the Las Vegas shooting, Google finally caught on and releasedthis statement:

“Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing aninaccurate 4chan website in our Search results for a small numberof queries. Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmicallyreplaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for anyqueries, and we'll continue to make algorithmic improvements toprevent this from happening in the future.”

As the chaos of news swirled around Las Vegas, we heard newsthat Tom Petty had died. The problem was, it wasn't true. Yes, hewas gravely ill, but not dead. This makes me sad in that this wasCBS News that screwed up. They took the breaking TMZ story that TomPetty had been taken off of life support and an enthusiastic newsproducer falsely claimed that the LAPD confirmed Petty's death. Thenews spread across every social media platform that Tom Petty wasdead. Shortly after, the LAPD put out a statement that they didn'tconfirm the news and that this wasn't even their jurisdiction. Bythat point CBS, USAToday, AP, NBC News, FOX News and several majornews networks had broadcast that he was dead. CBS retracted andeven deleted the social media post. So did AP. And in this socialmedia news rush, nearly everyone screwed up. Except the New YorkTimes. Fortunately for them, they remained focused and did whateveryone else should have done – stayed calm. Their reporterscouldn't confirm the story through their sources and therefore theynever ran it as others did. Sadly, the rock legend did pass awaythe next day. By then, social media audiences were left confused.News producers were fired. And the industry took another black eye– this time it was self-induced.

Combining these two stories in less than two days left me withthe easy decision to write off social media for any form ofbreaking national news. I can't trust it any longer.

For breaking news, I'm sticking with my local news outlets andindustry-specific news hounds. It's too easy for the news to bemanipulated and when mistakes happen, Facebook and Google areculpable in the spreading of false stories and even when storiesare corrected, the social media/tech giants don't have a fix toensure their audiences are properly informed.

After the love is gone.

What used to be right is wrong.

Can love that's lost be found?

No, Maurice. No, it can't.