In 1968, if something big happened in Wetzel County, you heard about it three ways. Your neighbor told you over the fence. The Wetzel Chronicle showed up on Wednesday, or you listened to Walter Cronkite at 6:30.

That was it. Two channels, one newspaper, and the gossip at the Esso station, and somehow, we thought we knew what was going on.

In the 1960s and 70s, the news ran on a schedule because life did. If the council met Wednesday, you read about it next week. Radio had Paul Harvey at noon with “the rest of the story”, and the local station cut in for farm reports and obituaries.

TV was king, but it was a limited king. CBS, NBC, ABC. You watched what they gave you, when they gave you. Huntley-Brinkley signed off with “Good night, Chet. Good night, David.” And that was the country’s bedtime story.

The beauty of it was we all watched the same one. When Cronkite took off his glasses and said, “Saigon… the Viet Cong attacked the U.S. Embassy,” your boss saw it. Your barber saw it, and the people you didn’t agree with saw it. So we argued about it, but we weren’t arguing about what happened.

The downside was if they didn’t cover it, it didn’t happen. Fast pitch softball packed the stands in New Martinsville in 1974. Try finding that on NBC. If a plant or mine plant laid off 30 men in the area and it wasn’t big enough for the AP wire, the rest of West Virginia never knew.

The news was slow, but it was the truth and wore a suit.

News in that era had friction built in. A reporter had to call you back. An editor had to fit it on the pageFilm had to be developed. The six o’clock news had 22 minutes minus commercials to tell the world.

That friction filtered a lot of garbage. It also killed speed. When the Ohio flooded in ’72, folks in Friendly heard it from the fire siren before they heard it from Channel 7.

But the process meant something. Two sources confirmed it and you printed the retraction on page 2 if you blew it. “Truth” wasn’t a brand, it was a procedure. You trusted Cronkite not because he was perfect, but because when he said “And that’s the way it is,” he’d spent the day trying to make sure it was.

Today, the flood hits Upshur County at 4:12 p.m. and your phone buzzes at 4:13. By 4:20 there’s drone video on Facebook, a livestream from somebody’s porch, and three arguments in the comments about whether it’s “climate change or the drains.”

We don’t have gatekeepers. We have a million gates, and no fences.

You can watch the Pleasants County rescue in real time from a volunteer fireman’s helmet cam. You can read the Governor’s statement, the EMA post, the FEMA link, and a guy in California telling you it’s fake, all before the water crests.

We’ve traded the 22-minute newscast for the infinite scroll. The Chronicle can’t compete with a cell phone. Local TV runs a 20-second clip and sends you to their app. The national news is 24 hours of panels, but the story you care about, the road out to your camp, is on a county EMA page with 600 followers.

And now AI. It’s the first “reporter” in history that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t leave the desk, and can file a story on the St. Marys tornado before the rain stops. True or not they tell it, and it’s the gospel to the weather and bad news trolls. You know who they are! They don’t sleep either!

That’s changed our dependence on truth in two ways. In 1975, if the AP didn’t write it, you didn’t read it. In 2026, you can ask an AI “what happened in Tyler County last night” and get a summary in five seconds. You don’t need to wait for the paper or trust one anchor. For a man in Paden City who wants to know if Route 2 is open, that’s power. It’s likely a troll has it plastered on their page. They know AI can pull the EMA release, the 911 call logs, the gauge data, and the Facebook video and stitch it together while you’re making coffee.

Cronkite had a newsroom. The AI has the whole internet — including the liars, the trolls, and the people who think the National Weather Service controls the weather. AI doesn’t “know” the truth. It predicts what should come next based on what it’s read. Most days, that prediction looks like the truth. Some days, it’s confident and wrong.

So we’ve gone from depending on a few men to tell us the truth, to depending on a million strangers to post it, to depending on a machine to sort it. Each step gave us more access and less certainty.

The risk in the 70s was the lie of omission. The risk in the 2000s was the lie of speed. The risk now is the lie of fluency. AI can write a paragraph about a St. Marys tornado that sounds real even if the tornado never touched down. It can cite sources that don’t exist, with a tone so calm you’d swear it was Cronkite.

So how do you tell the truth in 2026? Same way you did in 1966, you go look.

You check the creek yourself. You call the EMA. You wait for the sheriff’s press release and read it alongside the video from the guy down the street. You use AI the way you used the library, to start, not to finish. You ask it for the river gauge reading, then you click the USGS link and see the graph with your own eyes.

In the 70s, we trusted the man in the suit because he had the film. In the 2000s, we trusted the crowd because they had the phones. Now we have the film, the crowd, and the machine that can fake both, and you can’t trust any of them.

What we need is the old habit, skepticism before sharing, and patience before panic.

The only thing that hasn’t changed is the rule your dad told you. If it sounds too wild to be true, go stand on the porch and look.

The truth didn’t change. Our dependence did. We used to depend on ourselves to find it. Now we depend on ourselves to recognize it.

“And that’s the way it is.”