The Tony Stewart/Kevin Ward, Jr. situation has shined a light on two of the ugly parts of the media today.

In wanting to become recognized as a big-time sport on the national level, NASCAR has opened the door for the national media to opine on any topic surrounding the sport. What that leads to, as we've seen this week, is a lot of folks offering opinions on something they know very little about.

And, because a lot of media folks feel a need to assign blame to someone; they have; even though no one who was actually involved has spoken.

Bottom line: there's a lot of air time to be filled; and they're going to fill it with something.

The other part is the social media aspect. The number of folks who follow the traditional media rules of getting facts from, possibly, multiple sources before reporting anything, is dwindling. And, they're being replaced by folks who create a forum and start blasting away regardless of the facts, and without taking a minute to think about the potential fallout from their words.

The days of checks and balances are largely gone. And, what we have now is an example of how technological advances aren't always improvements.