Confused by the news

BY ZACHARY HUBBARD

April 09, 2008 10:02 am

— Mark Twain once said, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.”
While the saying may have rung true in Twain’s era, it has lost some of its sting.
I’m a big fan of newspapers.
When I travel, I try to get a copy of the local daily, more to see how it reports the news than what’s being reported.
Most of all, I like the fact that there is still a degree of personal accountability in the newspaper profession.
Sure, there are problems with newspaper reporting. I detest editorials in the news section, subtly disguised as news. I hate it when newspaper reporters lie. But at least they’re bound by a professional code of conduct. Some reporters pay for violating the code. The New York Times sacked reporter Jayson Blair in 2003 for journalistic fraud.
Our society is adrift in a sea of information in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. Subscriptions to newspapers are declining. A growing number of people rely on the Internet as their primary news source.
While this is not necessarily bad, it has its risks. If Twain were alive today, he would probably say, “If you don’t surf the Internet you are uninformed; if you do surf the Internet you are misinformed.”
Almost anyone can have a Web site. I have one that I designed myself, and I didn’t follow any ethical code.
It costs $10 per year to register my site’s name and $7 per month for a hosting service to place it on the Internet. As long as I avoid illegal activity, I can post and say virtually anything I want, be it truth or fiction. My only risk is litigation.
Everyone needs several trustworthy news sources.
Mainstream news sources, such as daily newspaper Web sites and large news service Web sites such as The Associated Press, United Press International, CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox News and National Public Radio are reasonably trustworthy, even if you don’t agree with their opinions.
Some less trustworthy Web sites are fairly easy to spot.
Scattered among the so-called news articles is a lot of advertising for things such as hot stock recommendations to make you rich, key chain radiation meters to warn you if you’ve been irradiated, amazing anti-aging creams, miracle weight-loss pills and the like.
Unfortunately, there are many untrustworthy news Web sites that aren’t easy to spot. A lot of these carry information attacking the very social fabric of our society.
You may be familiar with some of their more prevalent examples of misinformation, such as the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to kill blacks, or the Israelis created an ethnic bomb that kills only blacks and Arabs. Both of these myths are directly traceable to former Soviet Union propaganda disseminated during the Cold War.
The Israeli ethnic bomb story was repeated in a letter by a Palestinian activist published in the June 10, 2007, church newsletter on the Web site of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, Barack Obama’s church.
More recent examples of blatant misinformation circulating on the Web claim that Obama is really a closet Muslim and the CIA secretly imploded the World Trade Center towers on 9/11.
Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, depended on the principle of “the big lie.” Goebbels understood that repeating any lie enough times would make many people believe it.
Phil Taylor of the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, England, has an informative Web site (http://129.11.188.64/papers/index.cfm?outfit=pmt) dealing with misinformation, disinformation and psychological operations.
Carefully consider the source before accepting any information on the Internet as true.
“We interrupt this column with breaking news from The Galleria, where an unconfirmed source has just confirmed that a highly placed, unidentified source reported seeing Elvis at the food court a few minutes ago.”
Whoa. Sorry to have to stop so abruptly, folks, but I have to go to The Galleria. This might be my only chance to snap a photo of the King while he’s in town.

Zachary Hubbard is a freelance writer residing in Upper Yoder Township. He is a member of The Tribune-Democrat Reader Advisory Committee.