I’m a big believer in the idea that things that appear to be good to be true usually are. So when people e-mail me with stories or links to web sites that seem too good to be true, I want to see some pretty serious source documentation before repeating the claim. For example, if someone wrote me saying that Ingrid Newkirk had recently given a speech calling for the murder of researchers, I’d want to see multiple mainstream sources.
For reasons I will never comprehend, I do not appear to be in the majority on this. A good recent example are a series of memos supposedly leaked by someone at a major media organization that depict a ridiculous level of micromanagement of news stories toward a political bent. I first ran across these when someone posted them to VoicesOfUnreason.Com.
The first major problem with these supposed memos is they don’t read at all like something that would come down from someone managing a news department. For example, there’s this,
(March 12) At this point in time, reference to North Korean military threats must be played down entirely. The Iraqi Freedom campaign has to be concluded in the public mind before proceeding with the next assault on the Evil AxisÂ….
That reads like it was written by someone outside of a news organization whose main understanding of how news organizations work comes mainly from TV and film. It doesn’t come close to ringing true.
Second, it is from an anonymous source, which are next to useless unless it’s coming from an established, credible individual or newspaper. If the Washington Post says it has an anonymous source I give that a lot more credibility than some yahoo with a weblog citing an anonymous source, depending always on the seriousness of the allegations that Mr. or Ms. anonymous is making.
Despite both of these problems, this series of memos was posted on the various Indymedia.Org web sites and from there filtered out to various left-liberal weblogs.
Which is sort of ironic when you look at the ultimate source — they were first posted on TRBNews.Org, which is, among other things, a Holocaust denial web site that publishes articles like The Myth of the Six Million. Of course just because they’re anonymous and appearing on a Holocaust denial site doesn’t mean they aren’t true, but I’d put their authenticity right up there with recent sightings of Elvis.
The IndyMedia folks and others who picked up on the story saw the memos as betraying a conservative view, but to the Holocaust denial crowd they further their claims that the media is controlled by Jews with items like,
(March 19) No mention, repeat, no mention, of Palestinian suicide bombers during the Iraqi operationÂ….
These sorts of folks believe that the war in Iraq was carried out largely to benefit Israel, and each of the items here reinforces that view.
It only took a few minutes using Google to track these “memos” back to their original source, but apparently quite a few people lack either the ability and/or interest in doing so. Odd that for years we’ve heard this mantra that the problem in the world today is too much information and not enough knowledge. Now, though, when we have an incredible tool that makes it relatively easy to transform information into knowledge quickly, it seems to go underused for that task.