U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry delivered some words of wisdom to the Rotary Club of Amarillo: If someone tells you something is true because they saw it on the Internet, do some factchecking before drawing such a conclusion.

Thornberry’s remarks should ring true in this age of instant communication. It’s the product of the Internet and the proliferation of media, many of which have a political axe to grind.

Thornberry, a Republican from Clarendon who has served in the U.S. House of Representatives since January 1995, cited Rotary’s Four-Way Test – which is a sort of code of conduct for Rotarians – the first of which asks: Is it the truth? In this age of instant information, Thornberry has concluded that whatever he hears isn’t always necessarily the truth. Instead, it is someone’s version of the truth.

Emails get distributed instantly around the world with assertions about all manner of things. One of the examples Thornberry cited Thursday involved President Obama. An email has been bouncing around that says the president has issued more than 900 executive orders during his term in office. Not true, Thornberry said, adding that Obama has issued a little more than 100 such orders, which is “about normal” for a president.

The Information Age can be described as the Disinformation Age, given all the bogus information that gets passed around as “fact.”

Allow me some candor here: So much of it in recent years has sought to demonize Barack Obama with filthy innuendo and outright smears.

What I’ve learned in my professional life is that one man’s fact is another man’s propaganda. Thus, I’ve learned the hard way to believe only a tiny fraction of whatever I see on the Internet. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve cringed at the words, “I know it’s true because I read it on the Internet.”

Thornberry’s message was a measured, reasoned response to the proliferation of malarkey (to borrow a phrase from Vice President Biden) that is littering cyberspace at this very moment.

I’m reminded of what an investigative reporter once told a meeting of journalists at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference I attended in the 1970s. “If your mother tells you she loves you,” he said, “check it out.”