Rawlins Gilliland discovers truthiness
Thursday March 22, 2007
Our Scion xB-loving combox friend Rawlins Gilliland has discovered truthiness. Hear (or read -- but really, you need to hear his smooth-bourbon Texas voice) his public radio commentary denouncing Internet rumor-mongering here. I can't get my dad to stop forwarding me rumors he gets off the Internet. For a while I was going to Snopes.com and sending him facts debunking whatever he'd just passed along. What I don't understand is why people pass this stuff along without checking it first. Sometimes these rumors are really damaging to a person or company. If Acme, Inc., is really grinding up the bones of illegal immigrant babies to make paint pigment for Scion xBs, that's such a scandalous accusation that one has an obligation to make a minimal effort to see if it's true before spreading the rumor. But nooooooo...
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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What? You mean all the stuff that I read on the internet might not be true? Quick. Someone call Al Gore and tell him that his Internet needs fixin.
Could it be a generational problem? I get my forwards from my Dad who is in his 60's. I think he automatically believes them because since he did not grow up with the internet like I did his only frame of reference for "news" or stories that are presented as true is from newspapers or magazines that usually can be trusted to check facts, sources etc...
Well, SJ... yeah. I told my grandfather, who would be about 105 now, that not everything on TV was trustworthy and he got mad. "What? They can't lie on TV!!" He was a good man, but only had a 5th grade education. He had been an ardent, active Republican in his working days and after retiring and watching the constant skew for awhile he, like many of his limited education, became liberal and disillusioned.
People are basically gullible and don't like to think. P.T. Barnum was right.
What fascinates me, as a college lecturer, is that so many college students today insist that they are skeptical, critical, and sophisticated, that they would never believe anything just on the word of a parent, teacher, religious figure, politician, or other authority figure. But they will believe *anything* that they happened to read on some website. It's truly astounding. So I don't think it's just older folks who accept things on the internet uncritically.
I'd love to see someone completely trustworthy, like Walter Cronkite or the ghost of Abraham Lincoln or something, do an hour-long TV special on the difference between objective journalism and the shlock that passes for journalism on both cable and the web. Have it pre-empt regular programming on all networks at the same time for 24 hours to ensure everyone sees it. That might help ;)
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