But I would like to share some of the things I’ve been ruminating over at Like the Dew. Rather than repost them here, I’ll give you links and a brief summary.

• Can’t Go Home Again, a little riff on marriage equality, or, in more descriptive terms, same sex marriage, and how the times they are a-changin’.
• Guns, guaranteed to bring out the crazy. I don’t like them, by the way.
• Barbarians Inside the Gates, or, Humanity Has Lost Its Humanity.
• Scandalicious, about how my beloved colleagues in Teh Media wouldn’t know a scandal if it bit ‘em.
• Big Government, Little Town, about government intrusion into private lives.
• In the Hearts of Men, exploring the nature of terrorism.

That’s it so far. I told Lee I’d like to do two or three a week, and I haven’t made it that far yet, but I am being consistent. Please check those out, and while you’re at Like the Dew, check out some of the other fine writers over there.

It’s a little funny. My head is categorically opposed to being an “ist” of any kind. I don’t even like to say that I’m a writer. I say “I write.” But for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, it’s not enough in this case to say I meditate and work for peace and an end to suffering. I’m about to becoming a Buddhist. My head says GAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH. My heart says STFU.

This all started back when I was a kid, quite young. I grew up in a Christian household, but one that did not regularly attend church. Why? My mother and my father were from different protestant denominations, and neither denomination was happy about the union.

I did, however, attend every Vacation Bible School known to man, coming out of the experience rather confused about why we needed so many different versions of the same thing.

By the time I’d gotten to secondary school age, I had satisfied myself that all those denominations were, in fact, the same at their cores, although whatever dogmatic wallpaper the church leaders chose to put up made them seem different.

Before long I’d expanded my private comparative religious study beyond protestantism to Catholicism and its related subsets, Judaism in all its varieties, Islam, Hinduism, Confuciusism,  various animist religions and a lot more. But not Buddhism. I cannot tell you why I skipped it.

Some years later, after a strictly atheist phase followed by one that was more agnostic, I fell in with the Wiccans. This began to make some sense to me, what with the idea of the sacredness of the earth, the natural cycles of everything, harming none and having what you do come back at you three-fold. But there are, in case you didn’t know, quite a number of strains of Wicca, the old religion, which again made my ears burn just a bit.

And still, the bottom line was not all that different from other religions. I just found the wallpaper a little more pleasing.

Out of that, I came across Kabbalah. Yes, the same Jewish mysticism that you may have heard is fancied by Madonna, but my interest predates hers by a couple of decades. Now this stuff really made some sense. It understood the mythic stories of religion to be mythological, to be allegorical, to be stories that explained the things the human mind could not begin to comprehend.

This was where I first understood the human predilection to either deify or demonize just about everything, a duality that holds our minds in a tightly wound vise and gives us only two views of a world that exists in no fewer than three dimensions.

If you have but two things from which to choose, you have no choice. You have a dilemma.

There was just one problem. Kabbalah stimulated my intellect, stirred me to think outside the box … but it didn’t touch my heart.

A quarter of a century later, that one world religion I had never explored touched my heart and my mind. But I found that I had a hard time calling it a religion. It’s more a way of life, a philosophy, one that celebrates the sacredness of all things and beings, that strives for peace and seeks to see where we are connected instead of where we are separate.

Buddhism, of course, has had its moments of violence and schism, and some — Myanmar, for example — still exist. But the core is very simple, and does not require obedience to a god or gods that are just simply ways of understanding the incomprehensible.

Used to be that old religions gave way to other religions, usually at the point of a sword, but also because the old religion had outgrown its usefulness. We’ve become such a fearful people, though, that we cling to our superstitions and swords in a very unhealthy way. To keep us safe from those fears, we’ve added layers upon layers of nothing, big huge and smelly piles of nothing that keep us from seeing what we fear, what we don’t understand — and also who we are.

So, this week, I become a refugee from this artificial life we’ve created, a stranger in a strange land. It doesn’t feel the least bit odd. I’ve felt out of place all my life, and now I’m joining a community of other misfits who think this old world needs all the help it can get and that our “leaders” don’t have a clue — and certainly not the nerve — to make the kind of fundamental changes to how we live that will save us.

It wasn’t hard to see why.

In the early hours of the Newtown shooting in December, news outlets reported the wrong man as the suspect and wrongly reported the suspect’s father as dead. They also reported a host of other things that turned out not to be true. Nearly all of the false reports began on television, but every one of them spread far and wide on social media.

The Dorner manhunt saw a repeat. Even as the cabin in which Dorner made his last stand was fully engulfed in flames, television reported a body, positively identified as Dorner, had been recovered from the structure. The report was tweeted and retweeted quickly, as every news organization “confirmed” what turned out to be incorrect information.

Cue the wrath of “old media” directed at the “new media” online. While I can’t deny that Twitter, Facebook and the like spread that misinformation far quicker than it could have been spread, say, 10 years ago, the problem isn’t with the technology. The problem is that too many journalists have all but abandoned the standards of good reporting.

In their rush to be first, to get the scoop, reporters have forgotten the second part of the dictum, “Get it fast, but get it right.” Everybody wants to be first, but in breaking news situations like these two, the scoop is likely to be early conjecture or even outright wishful thinking on the part of some official who isn’t even that closely connected with the story.

Maybe the fact that anybody with a smart phone could tweet out a detail that turns out to be the critical piece of the story does fuel some of this mad dash to put out any information without much investigation behind it. But again, that’s not the fault of technology. It’s just weak reporting.

At Storyful, we apply the same techniques to social media and social media sources that we would apply to any piece of information, starting with: “Does it make sense?” Although an unnamed Los Angeles Police official was the source of the claim that Christopher Dorner’s body had been pulled out of the cabin, that just didn’t make sense. The cabin was on fire, as seen on live TV. On the police scanner, officers said they would not be going in until the fire department gave the all clear. Plus, LAPD was not on the scene — San Bernardino County was.

With that in mind, here are a few tips to being a better social media journalist.

• Question everything. Don’t let someone else do your reporting for you. Many moons ago, in the early days of news organizations having web sites, I got into a heap of trouble because I published something onto the site that our own reporters had just said on television. It was wrong, dead wrong.
• Apply the smell test. If that piece of information stinks (i.e., makes no sense), it’s probably no good, no matter who gave it to you.
• Stop relying on anonymous sources. Unless the source is likely to be killed, he or she doesn’t need to be anonymous. “Because I’m not authorized to talk about it” is not a good reason to  be anonymous. If the source isn’t authorized, the information may not be either.
• Don’t confuse wishful thinking for truth. In the Dorner case, all those police officials sure hoped Dorner was dead in that cabin, and they may have even been fairly sure he was. But they had no way of knowing if there was a body until it was safe to get in there. And after that, identification takes time too, depending on how badly the body might be burned.
• Along the same lines, remember that everybody has an agenda. Even other journalists.
• Think. Apply common sense. Take notes, ask the same question over and over if you have to, and ask it of multiple people. Remember that the folks you’re talking with, unless they are on the scene, may well be doing nothing more than repeating what’s been said on the news. That goes double for political officials. The congressman doesn’t have a direct line to the command station. It goes triple for what you see on your timeline. Between those timelines and 24/7 news networks, it’s just one big echo chamber and not at all easy to distinguish the news from the noise.

Some of us belong to an organization called the Society of Professional Journalists, which has a very specific code of ethics. Its main headings are these: Seek truth and report it. Minimize harm. Act independently. Be accountable.

Responsible journalism, good journalism — whether “traditional” or “new” — requires all four of those tenets in equal parts. It’s not enough to pass along unconfirmed information, attributed to someone else, or even “confirmed” information that doesn’t pass the smell test.

And it’s not a battle between traditional media and social media. It’s a balance, tempered by good journalism.

This post originally appeared at Storyful.