The story goes that in the late 1930s, two elderly Jewish men meet in a park, and one of them is shocked to see that the other is reading a virulently anti-Semitic Nazi newspaper.

"How can you be reading that garbage?" asks the first man.

"Well," says his friend, "every time I read one of our Jewish newspapers, all I see are stories about how our people are suffering in Europe, how miserable their lives are. But in this Nazi newspaper, they say the Jews own everything and are taking over the world.

"I know it's not true, of course, but hey, in the Nazi paper, we're doing great!"

The story may well be apocryphal, but it makes a point quite applicable to what's going on in our media right now.

People are going to read what they want, listen to and watch what they want, and we can only hope they're smart enough to know what is truth and what is fantasy.

Right now, we're undergoing the most important information revolution since Johannes Gutenberg made his first printing press in 1450, and it's more than a little bit scary, especially for those of us who make our living in what has come to be known as the mainstream media, or MSM.

Today, anyone with a digital camera or cell phone and a computer can become his or her own media outlet, thanks to the Internet.

That can be a good thing. For one thing, there are countless opportunities for creative expression. Perhaps more importantly, thousands or even millions of witnesses to events can chronicle wrongdoing _ everything from muggings to hateful speech _ that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Just look at two recent events in which cell-phone cameras played a vital role.

A racist tirade by comedian Michael Richards would have been but a blip on the show-business news scene had it not been recorded and played over and over on television.

We also never would have known what a fiasco the hanging of Saddam Hussein was were it not for a cell phone that captured the whole sordid scene.

Computer weblogs _ or blogs _ abound on the Internet and are seen by thousands, maybe millions, of people every day. Some are wonderful, in the best tradition of citizen involvement in government and society as a whole.

Many others are not so wonderful and are not anywhere close to being worth the time it takes to read them. What's heartening, though, is that the public can usually be counted upon to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Besides, while the technology is new, spreading an idea has never actually needed a mainstream medium.

On Oct. 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and started a movement that led to a religious denomination that still bears his name. Thanks to Mr. Gutenberg's press, it took only about two weeks for the theses to spread throughout Germany, and about two months for most everyone in Europe who could read to see them.

Thomas Paine didn't own a media outlet when he wrote "Common Sense," the document that inspired Americans to seek independence in 1776, and later, "The Crisis," which stiffened the resolve of our new country in the darkest days of the Revolutionary War.

If today's bloggers are the natural heirs to the pamphleteers and religious rebels of the past, there comes a responsibility to seek truth, not just notoriety. For every reasoned opinion or treatise on the Web, there are probably dozens of hate groups that use the Web and the ignorance of their audience to spread their venom.

Less sinister are the many conspiracy-theory and other silly websites out there. But it's a fact that a growing number of folks get virtually all their political information from them, and that is beyond unfortunate.

For that matter, people who get most of what they know about politics from watching "The Daily Show" or listening to Rush Limbaugh are also just cherry-picking their information rather than taking in what's really happening in Washington and around the world.

If the trend keeps up, those young people who do happen to stumble upon a newspaper website may not be able to discern what's legitimate, fair news reporting and what's just some nonsense typed by a 40-something yutz sitting in his pajamas in front of a computer while his mother makes him a sandwich.

There's no little irony in the fact that without the MSM's newsgathering expertise and wherewithal, most bloggers would be bereft of topical things upon which to pontificate.

And if we believe that the ability to discern real news from fake isn't important to the next several generations, like the old Jewish man reading the Nazi newspaper, we'll just be kidding ourselves.

Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 432-1000, ext. 208.