The Proliferation of Dubious Information

I guess that I was lucky in that when the Internet began to blossom, I was teaching at a university. Those born in the Internet Age won't understand this, but when one of my students described in a senior research paper in the late 1980s the possibilities of hyper-links, I was amazed. In 1994, my husband and I noted that when we searched the World Wide Web, we often found links that led to nowhere, to internet parking spaces for future development. By 1997, when I was teaching at a university in Georgia, those parking spaces had become shopping malls. I spent the summer finding information on the web that I could incorporate in my freshman English classes, as part of the university's mandate to help our students become Internet savvy. Every semester, I designed a workshop to demonstrate to my students the need to view their internet sources with a critical eye. We looked at websites that were parodies of official government web sites. We looked at websites with a political agenda; we looked at websites that seemed authoritative yet which provided no proof to support their authority. In educating my students, I was educating myself.

And so I look with a jaundiced eye at what I read online. When I write, I try to support any facts or figures or quotes with a trusted source. This morning, I experienced another lesson in the importance of this practice. I was looking for statements that politicians had said publicly about the unemployed. I remembered reading in the news some rather negative statements that Speaker of the House John Boehner had made about the unemployed in the government battle to extend or not to extend unemployment benefits during the worst economic slump since the 1930s. To find those quotes, I used Google's search engine, and I came across a blog with a very disturbing quote attributed to Boehner--but the language of the quote made me pause. Can this be for real? I wondered.

And so I "Googled" a selection from the quote, and lots of links to blogs appeared in which the quote was reproduced. The writer of one blog, however, did mention that the quote was from an interview Matt Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, did with John Boehner, but the author of the blog did not include a link to the interview. Now all the warning sirens were going off in my head. Blogs are often useful sources of information, but accurate blog writers are going to include references or links to news sources to back up their facts and figures.

Of course, some blog authors are journalists who do their own research and who interview their sources. And sometimes, news worthy information may be overlooked by national news outlets, for any number of reasons. And perhaps they've just buried the information in the inside pages. But this is my rule of thumb:

• If a search brings up a long list of blog sources, and particularly blog sources with a political bent or agenda, then, whether or not I agree with that political agenda, I look for additional information from news sources. (If the blogs provide links to such a source, then those blogs have made my search easier and have helped establish their own credibility.)

In this case, I went looking for the purported interview that Matt Taibbi did with John Boehner, and I came across Taibbi's own blog post about this purported interview: It never happened. In a blog post titled "I Did Not Interview John Boehner,", Taibbi writes:

There is a story flying around the internet that purports to contain an excerpt from an interview that I did with John Boehner. This interview is a hoax, and neither I nor Rolling Stone had anything to do with it. There are some seriously bored people out there... if people are going to make up a fantasy activity for me in the future, please, make it a foot massage from Jessica Gomes, not face time with John Boehner.

And, no, I won't reproduce the dubious quote here. But if you want to read what Matt Taibbi actually did write about John Boehner, you can read his article here: "The Crying Shame of John Boehner," in Rolling Stone, 5 January 2011.

It takes a lot of time to make sure that what one is reading can be trusted. Most people don't have that time. But, hey, I'm unemployed and over fifty. What better use can I find for my time? Now I'm going to go plant a garden.