As there always is after a big, especially violent news event, there’s been a great deal of Monday morning quarterbacking about press coverage of last week’s shootings at Fort Hood.

Initial reports had the gunman , Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, shot dead and said he was one of three shooters.  It came out by the end of the day that he was, in fact, alive, albeit in rather rough shape, and had acted alone.

There will be much more learned about this in the coming weeks.  It seems relatively rare that the perpetrator of something this horrible survives, so if he lives through it we should be able to learn more than we usually do about his motives and what happened.

What amazes me is that some people apparently are surprised that initial, on-the-scene reports of what happened turned out to be inaccurate.  That’s the nature of chaos; it’s well, chaotic.

There was a time when we would’ve gotten the information a little later, but it would’ve been more accurate.  But those days are long-dead.  They actually died long before the Internet and Twitter and all the other technical wizardry made information instantly available.  The death throes began when CNN started and the news cycle went from once or twice a day to around the clock.  Immediacy began to take on a slightly higher priority than accuracy.  The thought was that any inaccuracies could be fixed in the mix.  The driving principle began to be getting the news out first, any news.

That’s the world we live in.  It’s the age of information.

Those of us in the information business have to look at that with some trepidation.  It’s always been a big part of our responsibility to make sure the news we put out is accurate, but folks seem to want it faster more than anything else.  As the editor of a weekly publication, immediacy isn’t much of an issue for me, but I spent enough of my career in the daily news media to understand the pressures of time competition.

But that push to get it now, and the sheer volume of information now available, have fundamentally changed the way news consumers get the news – and given them a whole new responsibility they never had before.

Back in journalism school, I was taught that one of the functions of the news media was to act as a “gatekeeper,” to determine what goes into the news report and thus out to the public.  Part of the job of an editor was to determine what went in and what went out. But what’s a gatekeeper to do when there’s no longer a fence, much less a gate to guard?

The problem is, the fence kept out a lot of crap.  And there simply isn’t anything to keep that out any more.

That’s left people vulnerable.  The marketplace of ideas was a nice concept back in the days when people had time to evaluate those ideas and the information they took in, but I’m not absolutely certain it works any more.  People are overwhelmed by information; it’s like growing up in some third-world backwater as a hunter-gatherer, then being plopped down in the middle of a modern American supermarket.  There are so many choices that you can’t begin to figure out what the best one is.

Too many people respond by simply giving up, by bagging any discernment, by simply buying whatever they’re sold (and make no mistake, much of the time it’s a sales job).  Thus we have C-list Hollywood stars giving totally unqualified medical opinions to flog a book and a nationwide political discussion polluted by the rankest kind of nonsense.

There was a day, for example, when people like birthers would have gotten one story – maybe – and then would have faded into richly deserved obscurity.  That one story would have said, accurately, “gee, look at these nutjobs, aren’t they wacky?”  Instead, we get weeks and weeks of stories that actually take such people seriously, as well as stories saying whether they should be taken seriously.  The answer is no, of course, but we’re compelled to sit through successive waves of banana oil nonetheless.

At least the birthers are sincere.  A much bigger problem is the entire industry that’s grown up around subverting the truth.  The health care debate is exhibit A there; there’s big money at stake and plenty of people, the recipients of that money, who have no compunction about lying to keep their lucre.  These are people who understand how to create complexity and know that most folks out there have neither the time nor the inclination to deconstruct what they’re saying.  The media can try to do that, but most news organizations are so cowed that they hesitate to say the emperor has no clothes.  And even if they do, there’s no guarantee that news consumers will be able to find the story amid the tide of other, less honest information.

So the responsibility, in the end, is going to come down to you, the people that are seeing the news.  You’re going to have to develop your own B.S. detector.  A good reporter has one and it’s not that hard to cultivate.  But when B.S. comes in the form of a tsunami, reporters can only do so much to hold back the tidal wave.  And now that the fence with that gate is gone, a lot of it’s going to get through.

That leaves the responsibility on you.  Those of us who once guarded the gates can do what little we still can, but you’re going to be on your own more often than in the past.

And maybe that’s as it should be.