By Nicholas Renard

It’s July.

The residual humidity from the early morning’s rain seeps through the windows and effortlessly exasperates my well-earned hangover as I turn to the television to switch my mind to autopilot.

Months have passed since I sat glued to mindless hours of gut-wrenching programming. I have recently tried to understand how I wasted so much time staring at the tube, and frankly, I have no explanation. Perhaps it was a feeble attempt to stimulate a stagnant imagination, while in reality I simply perpetuated the boredom.

When I set the channel to CNN, Brooke Baldwin is already reporting on an attempted kidnapping in Philadelphia earlier in the week. The alleged perpetrator had just been arrested after giving himself up.

It’s filler news, yes, however I was flabbergasted with how many times CNN played the traffic camera footage. The short video clip showed a man with no distinguishable features picking up a young child before quickly dropping it and fleeing the scene.

The suspect I soon learned was 33-year-old Carlos Figueroa-Fagot who was later charged with a smattering of felony and misdemeanor counts.

CNN’s coverage went on to show footage of the arraignment and interviews with key individuals involved with the proceeding; standard crime story reporting.

So in the case of this cut and dry crime story, in which no one was harmed and the bad guy was dealt with according, why exactly did I have to sit through so many replays of that blurry clip? Was once not enough? It took one viewing to realize there were few stimulating clues in the playback, yet we were bombarded with the clip again and again. I counted six individual times in the ten minutes I was tuned in.

Why the repetition? Here I was trying to remember even the sex of the endangered child in question and all I could wrap my mind around was how probable and personal the event appeared.

From this seemingly insignificant video clip I felt fear kindle inside of me, fear for my family and loved ones, strangers too. Fear that even the innocent are unsafe in our world.

A fear so crippling I lost all interest in the day’s subsequent stories. I thought only of the possibility of losing someone close in some heinous circumstances.

Flash forward six months. It’s now February.

I submit this thesis after months of focused analysis of major television news sources that lean both right and left. Major television media, regardless of their political agendas have, seemingly, assumed the roles of societal watch dogs. Could the current mission of these news sources truly be to subjugate the American public, keeping it in a state of consistent fear?

Moreover, this phenomenon surely cannot be limited to television. What of social media? Can we not safely assume that ubiquitous entities such as Twitter and Facebook could potentially be used in such an uncouth manner?

With such a steep influx in Twitter feeds and Facebook groups focusing around such pertinent social issues ranging from gun control reform to LGBT rights, most of which are initiated and regulated by unknown individuals, is the truth sometimes buried?

Take this Facebook story for example. In June of 2000, an email circulated from a one Capt. Abraham Sands of the Jacksonville, Fla. Police Department stating that hypodermic needles appearing to be infected with HIV were affixed to the undersides of multiple gas pump handles in the Jacksonville area.

The email added that 17 people were stuck in the Jacksonville area along with at least 12 other cases in neighboring states. Capt. Sands urged readers to inspect pump handles prior to filling to avoid any additional instances.

And last month, 13 years later, a similar story hit Facebook, blaring a familiar foreboding tune and confirming 16 instances of gas pump-related HIV infections.

If you’re still curious about the details you could contact Capt.  Abraham Sands yourself. But save your minutes, he doesn’t exist.

This story is a hoax. It is a hoax now on your newsfeed and was a hoax 13 years ago in your inbox.

I was told this story by an acquaintance. She assured me it was true, thrice.

But the shortcomings of social media don’t stop there. Countless instances of perpetuated falsity crop up on newsfeeds worldwide every day – memes heralding the death of either Morgan Freeman or Bill Nye still plague my newsfeed.

So amid this misinformation maelstrom, can we hope to stay afloat or are we doomed to drown beneath the swell?

The purpose of this site is to proffer the solution. I mean not to preach or to convert, only to educate and assay the potential shortcomings in the modern media, specifically social media.

I plan to provide pertinent information from a wide variety of primary sources, specifically media analysts from the University of Kansas as well as seasoned journalism professors. Their expertise, along with input from cognitive psychologists will help to shed a revealing light on this and delve further into future issues.

Ultimately, I hope to reach a conclusion resulting in a plan for a more steadfast and honorable mass-media system.

Join me.

By Nicholas Renard

As a middle-class child of no great privilege, I found myself in a state of bewilderment upon moving to Lawrence. Finally, after two decades of a rural upbringing, my fantastic preconceptions of city living were a reality. Overwhelming, overbearing, fiscally threatening –this was my new world.

And so for the last two years, during my time at the University of Kansas, I’ve done my best to adapt. I grew up in Russell, Kan. – population 4,500, prominent political persuasion: bigotry. Summer job at the grocery store, drive-in burgers, token small town America, it was great and I loved it. Far less temptations than the big city has to offer.

Leaving it all behind during my grand exodus to Lawrence was and continues to be one of the toughest decisions of my life.

Alas, two years later I found the change was necessary in facilitating intellectual freedom and eventual academic success. Two years later I have overcome a sizable amount of my urban claustrophobia and feel the city to be a productive environment conducive to higher education. Two years later I’m in my last year of journalism school, neck deep in Arabic language drills, anxious to peel off my Jayhawk jammies and bust into the workforce

Before studying at KU, I studied biology at Fort Hays State University in western Kansas. A friend of mine worked as the opinions editor at the campus paper and when a columnist failed to meet a deadline, he begged me for an emergency column. I had two hours to write some stimulating malarkey and three cups of coffee and four hundred words later, I was offered a paid position.

My success at the FHSU University Leader, along with a mishap in an afternoon chemistry lab involving an Erlenmeyer flask of nitric acid, led me to realize that writing, not biology was my true calling.