I get more disgusted every day with what I see on the front page of my morning paper.  Today I get the rumor story that Trump is considering replacing Rex Tillerson as secretary of state.

This is essentially a rumor based on unnamed sources, yet the AP and others report it as if it were factual news.  Tillerson is the target today, but there have been rotating targets in the media throughout the Trump presidency.

My guess is that there are people within the Trump administration or leftovers from the Obama administration who don't like Tillerson or who just want to disrupt the Trump administration.  The more these rumors are reported, the more people in the administration get mad at each other.  No matter where the rumors come from, they start to be believed, and some may come true.

I might as well read the National Enquirer or Star in the supermarket line if I want to read rumors on the front page.  The National Enquirer gets some things right also.

This Tillerson story is not at all different from:

- Ben Rhodes saying the Obama administration could spread lies about the Iran deal and people would report it.

- John Podesta, Hillary's top man, saying they could feed stories to certain reporters and they would just report them as if they were their stories.

- The DNC getting Fusion GPS to create a fake Russian dossier to destroy a political opponent, with reporters running the story endlessly, claiming Russian collusion;

- The fact that someone can feed reporters the talking points that tax cuts reduce revenue and reporters will report that as factual instead of actually reporting economic statistics from previous tax cuts.

- The fact that reporters continually repeat and report that middle-class income taxes will go up based on ten-year projections, even though they know that tax provisions and rates are routinely extended.  Reporters also know that the only reason the proposed tax rates expire is because of arcane Senate rules and because Democrats are so obstructionist that not one of them wants businesses and individuals to be allowed to keep more of the money they earn.

- The fact that reporters will just repeat whatever they are told on climate change and global warming based on inaccurate, manipulated computer models.  Rarely do you read actual temperatures in an article, and not once have I seen what actual sea levels were 100 years ago and what they are today.

Who is the next target in the Trump administration?  They change so often.  Rumors should never be on the front page or considered factual and just repeated over and over again.

Reporters are essentially worthless if all they do is repeat talking points based on an agenda.  Artificial intelligence seems to be a coming thing.  Most reporters should be worried because they could easily be replaced by robots.

Instead of reporters pretending to be fact-checkers, we should have someone searching for brains.

On a side note: Reporters are now acting as though it would have been a serious crime for Trump or Kushner to ask Flynn to speak to the Russian ambassador after Trump won the election.  Exactly what crime would that be?  I wonder if any president-elect or staff member has ever been questioned about conversations with a foreign leader after the president was elected.  I can't think of any.  I thought this 18-month investigation was about Russian collusion prior to the election, so why does it matter that someone talked to the Russians after election?  Does anyone recall any other previous investigation of any presidential candidate or staff member talking to a foreign official prior to the election?

Isn't it pathetic that the whole investigation – the spying, the illegal unmasking, and the illegal leaking of conversations – appears to be based on a fake $12-million Russian dossier bought and paid for by Democrats to destroy their opponent?  That should be the crime.