“Sometimes, I get so tense
But I can’t speed up the time”
“Patience” — Guns N’ Roses

In the 1980s, there were a host of big hair rock bands, and it seemed that every one of them had a slowed-down, acoustic guitar-led ballad that often ended up as the best-charting song for the group. Heck, Journey leaned hard into the ballad genre and made that the group’s primary music style after being a traditional late-70s/early-80s hard rock group in their infancy.

This song is such a ballad for rockers Guns N’ Roses, released in April 1989. Written by lead singer Axl Rose, the song is assumed to be about Rose and then-wife Erin Everly’s tempestuous relationship, though members of the group say that Rose came up with the lyric “out of nowhere” as the band was sitting around and jamming one day.

The song peaked at No. 4 in the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, though it interestingly never charted higher than seventh in the mainstream rock rankings.

That disparity was not uncommon for rock ballads, though, as many in rock music stations preferred “traditional” rock songs, and ballads that would chart often did better on mainstream radio than on rock stations.

“Patience” is written from a boyfriend to his girlfriend, discussing the ups and downs in their relationship. He encourages her that with patience as they work through things they encounter, their relationship has a chance to make it through the tough stuff.

We’ve recently had an excellent reminder of just how reliant (and frankly, dumbed down) we’ve become on our own impatience for the news cycle.

News delivery in the last 25 years has drastically changed, and if you ask the common person in America now, more than half consume their news on social media with nearly 80% of all respondents now doing their primary news consumption online.

Unfortunately, that means that in many cases, the desire is to get well-sourced news immediately, and for free.

Except that you simply cannot have all three.

You can have immediate responses, but they won’t be fully news, and even if you can consume them on free sources, advertising is involved to fund the site, and the lack of sourcing leads to dubious “facts” being espoused within articles.

If you have well-sourced, straight news, that takes time to vet sources and research the truth behind a story rather than simply write a reactionary piece.

Heck, these weekend columns are opinion columns, which does allow for some assumption and personal opinion to intertwine throughout the piece, but I also spend up to 10-15 hours researching each weekend column, not to mention time writing them - and my research time is not primarily spent finding a suitable song for the piece, trust me!

Of course, that research and work isn’t free, but let’s just say that it’s valued in our state below teaching and social workers, industres where the state is consistently viewed as one of the lowest-paying in the U.S. So often, those willing to put their heart into accurate, truthful news reporting get burned out by the fact that moving into another industry or even another area of the country can double (or more) take-home pay, and many of the best, most passionate reporters I’ve known have left the industry and/or the state simply to make ends meet.

Let’s take a look back over the past couple of weeks and some of the major stuff that was mistaken because of a hurry to have a story before the facts were truly known.

On July 13, an attempted assassin fired a bullet that barely missed former President Donald Trump. There are hosts of conspiracy theories on whether the attempt was staged, and that’s a discussion for a whole other piece.

In the moments immediately after the shooting a photo began circulating around social media showing a man in sunglasses who, according to social media posts that were shared widely, was a member of Antifa (not an actual organization, but again, another story for another day) and had “hate for Trump and MAGA.”

Except the photograph was of an internationally-known soccer and rugby podcaster, not the shooter. Posts with his face and the false information were spread more than 30 million times within the first 24 hours they were initially out, according to a Politico story.

The actual shooter, Thomas Michael Crooks, did not make a donation as a “registered Democrat” as many outlets still have up, including Fox News and CNN. He was 17 when he made a donation to a Democrat-based political group of $15, not yet eligible to vote and thus not registered. He has registered as a Republican his entire life that he was a registered voter.

Heck, the rush to sanctify the one person who lost his life in the shooting led to overreaction as well.

Gov. Kristi Noem quickly ordered flags flown at half-staff in remembrance of Corey Comperatore, the one of the three victims of the shooting who unfortunately lost his life. Comperatore was quickly hailed as a hero, and certainly, he has some positive things that he’s done in his life, but as many began campaigns to fire anyone who said anything untoward about the shooting, including a Sioux Falls teacher who lost her job due to social media posting, Comperatore’s social media posting was more than a little bit sketchy. He frequently ranted about far-right talking points, but one post has seemed to make the rounds most as he stated that those living in Gaza after the war will have to, “get over it. The Japanese did.”

Moving forward, Sunday, President Joe Biden announced that he would not be seeking the nomination of the Democrat Party after a recent bout with COVID raised additional questions about his health. He quickly endorsed his Vice President, Kamala Harris, and similar fact-less posts quickly made their rounds.

The most prominent post, as far as retweets and reposts on Twitter/X and Meta/Facebook was a post that stated that Kamala Harris was not eligible to be President due to being born to two refugees. This ended up making it onto two right-wing news entertainment shows, who apparently vetted the information about as much as their hosts did before reposting the “shooter picture” after the Trump attempt.

Harris had to go through significant vetting to be eligible to be the Vice President, all of the same sort of background information that one would have to go through as the President. This was done while Donald Trump was in office, so it was a Republican administration that reviewed her records and declared her eligible for the highest office in the country.

What is true, and oddly hasn’t been as widely noted on those same stations and is vetted and true information, is that Trump will be the oldest President in history upon election IF he wins the November election. Weird how that focus on the election suddenly disappeared Sunday.

When trying to spit out the fastest, newest misinformation, it seems like the truth is often overlooked or pushed aside, and unfortunately, it’s not just one-sided entertainment news websites that are doing this - it’s you and me not taking the time to do a quick search before reposting something that comes across our social media feed.

Take that time, look into sourced journalists that intentionally report the news, not opinion. Take a breath. We’ll all be better informed and calmer for it!