Today I received an email from a friend of mine. It included the text of an anti-Obama chain email, one that wasn’t overtly extremist in its language; in fact, it sounded like an angry person who wasn’t necessarily extremist.
My friend asked me if the claims were for real, so I checked and one by one the assertions in the email fell—some were outright lies, the rest distortions (some so distorted that they’re more correctly viewed as lies). So, it turned out, it was extremist propaganda masquerading as being from a normal person.
Frankly, I spent far too much time refuting the lies and distortions of that email—far more time than the average person would ever spend. And here’s the thing: I had no problem finding original sources (Presidential Executive Orders, laws passed by Congress, etc.). The only link provided in the chain email—to the Federal Register—was legitimate, but the interpretations were truly bizarre.
This particular email doesn’t matter, but rather how easy it is, even now, for political people to distort the truth to suit their own ends, and how, even now, people don’t check out what they hear in such emails (I checked because I was asked to; if I’d received the email I probably would’ve rolled my eyes, assuming it was nonsense, and deleted it).
I don’t see anything that can be done about this apart from this: When we get a political email—particularly one that seems to come from either end of the spectrum—we ought to completely ignore it if it doesn’t provide verifiable sources for the claims made—not news media sites, but actual original sources. Yeah, I know, I’m not going to see any political activist actually do that.
So, let me instead again quote that supposed journalists’ dictum: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” We may not want to take our email checking quite that far, but a healthy scepticism is a good thing. With some time and effort, if we seek the truth we can find it, whether the activists want us to or not.
5 comments:
The problemm with Twitter is that the very same story can be repeated ad nauseum. Some interpretation of Jon Kyl's interrogation of Judge Sotomayor showed up several times verbatim, no RT, yesterday, as though it were fact.
WV: presse. Fancy media.
That's very true. And I've read anecdotal reports that people are increasingly sharing links through Twitter than on blogs, which means that bad or biased information can spread FAST. I know that I—and I suspect other bloggers—don't like to something I haven't vetted first (I do that on Twitter, too, actually). But some people seem to Tweet first and check out later—like false or hoax reports of celebrity deaths, for example.
The slower pace of blogs has some advantages over "micro-blogging", obviously.
Um, I meant don't like to LINK to something unless it's been vetted… Typos: A problem on blogs and Twitter alike.
Well, we can't make people check-out facts!
Millions of people read newspapers and watch tv news - and those constantly distort facts.
You're doing a great job to set things a bit more straight tho, Arthur.
migratingfishswim: Aw, thanks!! As a non-journalist, I try and add perspective to news stories, sometimes providing the context that's otherwise missing, other times correcting things. But a lot of times I just want to have my say, which is part of what a blog like this is for. It's a lot easier to do that on a blog than the in the 140 characters of Twitter.
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