WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 (UPI) -- Journalism of verification in the blogosphere has been displaced by a journalism of assertion where rumors become facts and where facts are censored by omission. Hardly surprising then that 200 million Americans, two-thirds of the population, concede they don’t understand foreign policy issues. And only one-third say they understand major domestic issues. TV comedian Jay Leno's Jaywalking interviews confirm these figures. With 80 million blogs and more than 1 billion people now online, it becomes increasingly difficult to sort factoid from fact and truth from untruth.

Today, all you need to become an online know-it-all is a Web site, a blog and an attitude. Creative reporting is the new genre. And you achieve instant mass readership by turning your darkest suspicions into reality. No wonder newspapers are losing readers and advertising revenue -- and shedding domestic and foreign bureaus. Newspapers are dull next to the fantasy lucubrations dished out as hard news, or an unconfirmed front-page report next to the hard “fact” moving through the blogosphere courtesy of electronic tools that ensure mass diffusion.

A conservative journalist, speaking at a think tank meeting, said he hoped President Bush would order the bombing of Iran in his last few days at the White House in January 2009. Iranian retaliation? “The Iranians are already attacking us in Iraq,” he responded matter-of-factly. The bombs-away-over-Iran advocates are unfazed by Iran’s retaliatory capabilities. They dismiss a wider conflict, much the way they portrayed a cakewalk in Iraq.

But “What World War III May Look Like” is already a cyber favorite. Picture a minor incident involving a U.S. Marine patrol operating out of the new base at Badrah on the Iranian border, posits former CIA operative Philip Giraldi.

Superior Iranian forces claim the Americans strayed inside Iranian territory, and surround the Marines. They refuse to surrender and open fire. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards (which the Senate branded an “international terrorist group”) return fire. Helicopter gunships are called in and artillery fire is directed at Iranian military targets. Bush calls it an act of war and, in an emotional speech to the nation, orders U.S. forces into action.