Old media continues to cover new media as if they are discovering something the rest of us haven’t yet noticed.

Case in point: Driving to work this morning I was listening to On Point with Tom Ashbrook at WBUR in Boston. The entire hour was devoted the question “what’s next for advertising?”

The host had on a couple of ex-Madison Avenue ad men who had written books on the death of their industry, and a mommy-blogger who shills for Wal-Mart, Disney and other corporations — not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The ad guys were bemoaning the changes happening in their industry — one of them saying that this is an institution that has shaped our culture for 350 years!

I’m not sure about that. I know I did not hear anything about the self-inflicted damage done when an “industry” coalesces around persuading people, by hook or by crook, to buy things they do not need.

Am I too harsh? In fairness, I did not listen to the entire hour, so maybe they got around to covering it eventually. But I think they were asking the wrong question. They were focused on something like: “What do you do when the primary engine of commerce is showing signs of seizing up?”

That’s a legitimate concern. More fundamental and immediate though, are questions like: “Whom do I choose to believe? And why?”

People have been muting commercials for decades, and more and more are zooming past them with the DVR. The Yellow Pages and most direct mail go straight into the recyling bin. The kids don’t listen to radio, so they never hear 30-second spots. And no one misses any of that crap because it was mostly disingenuous and misleading, purposely designed to induce anxiety and aimed well below “the better angels of our nature.”

No single institution is to blame for the economic mess we’re in today. And there’s not always a clear cause and effect. But is advertising at least partially culpable for:

• the pervasive sense that everyone is lying
• an assumption that we are all entitled to “the best”
• over-blown, grandiose expectations across the board
• a collective inertia that prevents us from facing (and beginning to solve) serious societal challenges

The American Dream once referred to the classic Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story, in which our hero works hard and in the end achieves hard-earned wealth (which equals happiness, needless to say). As we all know, that much ballyhooed dream has been perverted into a fantasy of effortless wealth and easy fame.

Gee, how did that happen?

Advertising is not necessarily evil. But in the style it’s been practiced for the last 50 or 60 years, it deserves a lot of credit for the dumbing down of a country that’s gotten quantifiably stupider in comparison to places where they actually study in school.

As if showing hundreds of millions of people an endless parade of inventively creative false promises, delivered by fabulously attractive people, would leave everyone perfectly aligned mentally, spriritually, physically and emotionally.

Will Facebook and Twitter serve us any better? There’s at least a built-in accountability at work. Sincerity is harder to fake when anyone can track your conversation over time. So we’ve got that going for us.

Is the Internet going to become a giant truth-in-advertising machine? We can only hope.