Instructions to Believe

I've probably posted on this before. But this bears repeating.  It's about what you know vs what you've heard.  And this is a good thing to keep in mind when you're calling out a big government type on all the "lies", say, Fox News or Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck or any conservative tells.

This is from Morgan's blog glossary on The House of Eratosthenes.

I Have Been Instructed To Believe…
A simple acknowledgment that nowadays, people don’t hand hard information off to each other quite as often as they dispense instructions to each other about what to think. That is in spite of what we may pretend to be doing. The distinction is a very simple one to maintain. Someone gives you an opinion, you take the time to verify it before passing it on, you have informed somebody. If you pass it along without verifying it first, you are instructing them on what to think. It’s not only an easy difference to keep in mind, it’s a very important one. A lot of other commentators will gloss over it, but that doesn’t mean we have to do that here. So when people tell us what to think, we’ll go ahead and repeat it, but we call it what it is. It’s instruction about what to believe, nothing more, nothing less.

It's not about not repeating what you hear.  It's about recognizing that that is what you are doing, and that is what others are doing when you or they haven't followed up on or verified it.