Does it seem like the news has gone into overdrive since about mid-January? Since the beginning of the year, we have been blasted with a rapid-fire onslaught of hot news from almost every direction. Haven’t you found yourself wondering, Is it just me, or has 2011 been crazy already?

It’s not just you. Bob Schieffer knows where you’re coming from.

Here is how he closed out his Face the Nation program on Sunday:

Finally today, I’ve been a reporter for a while. Fifty-four years if you have to know, and I cannot recall an overload of news from so many places as we have experienced these past 11 weeks. It began in January with the horrible shooting of Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords in Arizona. But by the end of the month, all that pushed off television and the front pages as Egypt came apart. We wrestled with that story for three weeks until it was pushed aside by those protests by public union employees in Wisconsin. We got New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s take on that when he dropped by Face the Nation, but he wasn’t even out of the studio when the first trouble surfaced in Libya, then came one of history’s worst earthquakes followed by a devastating tsunami followed by the nuclear disaster in Japan. And now we’re back to Libya and trying to figure out if we’ve gone to war in yet another Muslim country and whether we’ll be asked to play a similar role in Syria and Yemen and who knows where else.

As if this crazily spinning world didn’t have enough staggering news events rocking it already, the pace has indeed spiked in recent weeks. It’s hard to take it all in.

In fact, as we seek to learn about the world around us, we simply cannot take it all in, even with all the latest gadgets. Our brains simply aren’t capable of processing the overwhelming amount of information out there.

But we do need to know what’s going on. And we do need to know what’s most important. We need to know: What is news?

We tend to fixate on what tickles our curiosity, what swells or pinches our pocketbooks, and what helps or harms our loved ones. But, as the first part of this year has proven, there are bigger things at play than that.

Professionals have billions invested in picking what to report on and how. They can’t cover everything. Even the world’s largest news services must select only a tiny fraction of events and make them news. They carve the world into chunks: geographic areas, politics, economy, sports, health, specific organizations and so on. They decide where to position their reporters—decisions that reflect certain prejudices: A president is more important than a policeman; Manhattan is more important than Minidoka. A harried assignment editor allocates reporters to events that seem most dramatic. The reporter arriving on the scene has plenty of decisions to make too. His perspective—limited and flawed as it may be—will affect all of these choices and shape the way he conveys that event. As the stories come in, news directors and editors must determine which will fill the 23 minutes of that night’s broadcast or the space in tomorrow’s paper not devoted to advertising. Newsroom directors make these determinations according to the story’s timeliness, proximity to the audience, level of drama, celebrity of the subject, how many people it affects and so on. Then they factor in organizational policy; ideological slant; sense of public need or taste; need for ratings/subscribers and accountability to the advertisers that pay for it all. Up and down the chain—from the event to the finished news product—dozens of judgments simply have to be made.

Creating news is not a science. As journalist Walter Lippmann once pointed out, news is not the same as truth. It is a concoction—originally rooted in reality but fundamentally limited, partial and artificial. Consider it “based on a true story.” A discerning consumer shouldn’t accept it at face value.

The Trumpet faces many of the same decisions as we monitor world events: What will we cover? How should we write about it? How much space should we give it? We grapple with limited intelligence, personal assumptions and flawed perceptions as much as everyone else.

But the news source you are reading uses an entirely different criterion than any other source out there. In some basic ways, we are quite different from any other source from which you may receive news. For one, because we are independently funded, we have no accountability to advertisers and little need to adjust our content in order to pander to subscribers.

But the key difference is the primary criterion we use to determine a story’s newsworthiness. It transcends and supersedes all other criteria by a vast margin—and is completely ignored by every other news outlet. While other criteria can swing and fluctuate and suck the process toward silliness, this guiding principle keeps Trumpet content focused like a laser beam on what truly is—even in an absolute sense—important.

That criterion is prophetic significance.

In order to prove His omnipotence, millennia ago God recorded in Scripture descriptions of future events, and is now bringing them to pass (Isaiah 42:9; 46:9-10; 48:3-5). These provide signposts pointing to the imminence of Jesus Christ’s Second Coming—an event the Messiah Himself told us to prepare ourselves for by watching and praying (Luke 21:36).

For an overview of the major biblical prophecies that inform our perspective, read our article “But What Do I Watch For?” It explains the four major power blocs Scripture says will dominate the scene in the days just before Christ’s return (and, sure enough, they are plainly evident in today’s headlines). It gives us the general trend to watch for in each of these power blocs, as well as the major interactions they will have with one another (many of which are occurring before our eyes). As you survey the torrent of events in the world, this overview is invaluable for determining what to focus your attention on. The closer to this biblical formula whatever you are watching is, the more important it is.

We must be able to see world events as they are shaping this prophetic reality. This is the approach the Trumpet takes. This is the single factor we use to determine an event’s newsworthiness. Of course, things often transpire in a way we might not expect, and we should never assume we see the whole picture. But having this overview enables us to see the reality behind what is occurring—and to see where it is truly leading. This is what gives the Trumpet its unique perspective.

To us, news is much more than a curiosity. As we watch events aligning, bit by bit, step by step, with the prophetic view spelled out in the Holy Bible by the living God, it is proof positive that “the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men” (Daniel 4:17) and that He is about to bring justice to this weary world. Thus, our message has driving purpose: to inform, to witness, yes—but also, hopefully, to motivate and inspire. The fact that each story has been chosen for its prophetic significance carries this urgent, implicit message: Seek God while He may be found.