Twenty, 30 and 40 years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth, politicians' conspiracy theories and rumored sex lives were largely ignored by mainstream media unless there was ready and credible proof that preposterous claims were true.
But today, in the Twitter and Facebook world, reporters are reporting on tweets and posts - essentially elevating blathering posts and what used to be bathroom talk to court testimony, meeting minutes or other government reports.
The result is unfortunate. The result is that if Donald Trump and his ilk say at a rally or in a tweet that President Obama is a Kenyan, that Ted Cruz's father was involved in John F. Kennedy's assassination and that Hillary Clinton plans to abolish the Second Amendment, today's reporters - especially TV's talking heads - treat such baloney with complete credibility.
Instead of treating it as the flush it is, they all but ask: Mr. Cruz, did your father ever tell you where he hid the gun?
Ethics in reporting? Say what?
Apparently now that every yahoo on the planet has a smart phone and a Facebook place on which to pretend town-crier importance, the same is becoming true at city halls and county courthouses.
That's the news world we find ourselves a part of in Chattanooga this week when bitter political enemies with Facebook pages jumped to make hay from a domestic violence charge against the husband of one of Mayor Andy Berke's top aides.
The husband claims there were illicit liaisons, according to "sources" paraphrased by some postings.
City officials, driven by the wanna-be news sites, emphatically denied the allegations Wednesday.
The Times Free Press reported the arrest some days ago, and left the gossip lying until the mayor and police chief took the extraordinary actions of making straight-up denials in news statements.
At that point, the mayor's and police chief's denials of the far-fetched became legitimate and credible news. And those denials hopefully will put the rumorfest via social media to rest.
"Social media" - what a disgusting term that lets gossip masquerade as "media."
But like it or not, we see this changing era all around us - both in the way news is made and in the way it is reported in a time when headlines come to you twice a minute instead of twice a day. The rise of Donald Trump is a perfect example.
But back to the dinosaurs: Nearly 40 years ago in Alabama, George Wallace brought a $10,000 state check to a small, all-black town as a grant to install new water lines. This writer, then a cub reporter with less than a year's experience, covered the event and watched as the very highly educated black mayor introduced Wallace, the famous former third-party presidential candidate who became known as the embodiment of resistance to the Civil Rights Movement and who had been paralyzed from the waist down by a would-be assassin's bullet.
At the event, Wallace, with glazed eyes, put out his hand six inches to the right of people seeking to greet him with a handshake. Later he nearly fell from his chair. But he could still keep those politician words sliding from his tongue.
As the town's black mayor introduced the governor, he bellowed in preacher-like tones to the audience of about 200 black residents and a handful of white aides: "Ladies and gentlemen, it is with a great sense of deep humiliation that I present to you today the governor of the great state of Alabama - George Corley Wallace."
The mayor didn't misspeak. He didn't mean to say humility. He didn't correct himself. And the slight went unreported.
Later in the newsroom, the quote brought a hearty laugh, but didn't make the story. What was reported was that the town got a grant. And Wallace praised the city's leadership.
In today's world, the story wouldn't be the grant. It would be the slight. The evening story would be the governor's response. Tomorrow's story would be residents' and state lawmakers' and pundits' responses to the slight and the governor's return slam.
What would be lost would be the news that actually changed the lives of residents of a tiny, poor town with with just over 1,000 people - 99 percent of them black. What would be lost would be that political differences exist but life goes on, often marching toward improvement.
Mayor Berke, his aide, his police chief and his whole administration have real work to do - some of it to combat domestic violence. And that's news.
But short of real documentation showing any alleged trysts on city time (remember the video footage of a storage-unit "love nest" frequented by a former Cleveland police chief and clerk?), the speculation and gossip of Twitter and Facebook is not news.