The other night I tuned into a PBS show called “The Great American Read.” It purported to promote reading by highlighting the 100 Greatest Books ever written. Cool. I’m a reader. Give me the news.

Almost immediately, I tuned back out. First of all, it was not the 100 greatest books. It was the 100 most loved novels, which rules out quite a lot of scribbling in various fields and forms. Next, who decided on this top 100? Experts, scholars, professors, other authors? No. A poll of representative Americans controlled to match the country’s demographics. Or, as PBS loves to say, people like you. Except most Americans don’t watch PBS. Or read.

Guess what? A random bunch of Americans who may have only read one novel in their lives or may be twelve years old, came up with a ridiculous list. For starters, Americans think most of the greatest novels, 64 out of 100, were written by Americans. USA! USA! Not only that, 70 of the 100 have been written since 1945. We are apparently living in the Golden Age of literature. Who knew?

In fact, all such lists have a bias in favor of the recent, suggesting most people are only dimly aware that anything happened before they were born. So, on best and worst president lists, those whose pictures are on the money and who were elected since World War II dominate. The times of Buchanan, Harding, McKinley, Pierce are terra incognita . Most of the greatest movies, songs, you name it, all seem to have come from the last 50 years.

So, what’s on the list? About what you’d expect. Novels that people who don’t read were forced to read in school and therefore feel safe in naming. “Great Expectations,” “A Separate Peace,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Tom Sawyer” (but not the controversial Huck).

After that come huge swathes of genre fiction, often books that have been made into movies, so actually reading may not have been required in order to appear au courant. “Jurassic Park,” “The Godfather,” “The Da Vinci Code,” “Game of Thrones,” “Lord of the Rings,” a Tom Clancy, an Agatha Christie, a Stephen King.

Then there’s a lot of Young Adult and Kiddie Lit, which suggests reading stalled at an early age. “Harry Potter,” “The Hunger Games,” “Narnia,” “The Outsiders,” “Charlotte’s Web,” “Alice in Wonderland.” And finally, Ladies Book Club favorites — “Gone with the Wind,” “The Notebook,” “The Book Thief,” “Rebecca,” “Outlander,” even “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

To be fair, a few of the novels usually regarded as classics from the two or three hundred years before 1945 did show up — Austen, Bronte, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Melville. But what a lot is missing. In English, Fielding, Thackeray, Sterne, George Eliot, Henry James, Wharton Cather, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Bellow, Roth, and so on.

And whole sections of the globe get no notice. France is represented by nothing, other than “The Count of Monte Cristo,” which ought to have Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Proust and a host of others whirling in the Pantheon. Italy, nothing. Japan, ditto. Germany, one entry. Though, in a sign of changing times, a considerable number of recent books with African and Hispanic roots are present. Along with Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin.

Of course, it may be premature to conclude that anything published in the last few decades is among the 100 greatest novels ever. Such judgements take a while to settle. But, it’s only a TV game, so who cares? Except this is just another instance of a worrying trend, treating the unreliability of crowd-sourced information as if it is meaningful, trustworthy, gospel.

Restaurant reviews, for example, used to be written by people who dined for a living, knew a lot about food, and whose advice could be relied on. In the age of Trip Advisor and Yelp, you are liable to get reviews of French restaurants complaining that there were no burgers on the menu and the meat came with weird creamy sauces instead of ketchup. Similarly, if you trust Rotten Tomatoes to tell you which movies to see, you’ve going to have a lot of rotten experiences down at the multiplex.

When judging which information to trust, the warning that was drummed into our heads beginning in about 7th grade was — Consider the Source. Does the guy recommending the restaurant eat anywhere besides Taco Bell? Does he own the restaurant being lavishly praised? Has he ever eaten anywhere besides Buffalo?

Considering the source is tricky enough when the source has a name and address, but when a crowd is the source there’s no way to know if the amorphous blob of opinions is reliable or biased, ignorant or educated, trustworthy or corrupt,

Our current president marks the apotheosis of this trend. His usual validation for any idea or opinion is, it must be true because “everybody’s saying” or “I hear all the time.” But that doesn’t make the idea true or good or valid — just frequently repeated. And given his intolerance of dissent, maybe what everybody’s saying is what everybody knows he wants to hear. Or maybe “everybody” is everyone who works for Fox news, his source for all information—fair and unbiased.

Depending on “everybody” saying “The Notebook” is the greatest novel ever written won’t kill you, but it might waste time that could be better spent reading “Bleak House,” “Tristram Shandy,” “Candide,” “The Ambassadors,” “Parade’s End,” “The Way We Live Now,” “Love in a Cold Climate,” “The End of the Affair,” or anything by Knut Hamsun, Evelyn Waugh or Henry Green.

Depending on “everybody” saying Putin is a great guy or Kim Jong-Un can be trusted or Trump wants to help the working man can have real world consequences. Be wary. Consider the source. And read a book “everybody” hasn’t recommended. Everybody is generally wrong.