Most of the time I simply press the delete key when I receive one of those e-mails sliming some individual or group. You know, the ones that someone has forwarded to everyone in his (or her) address book.j
Occasionally, though, I read through one, search for the facts, and send a link to Snopes or one of the other fact-checking sites to all of the addresses on the e-mail. Not that it does a lot of good.
I find it curious – and even a little scary – that people who are civil enough personally are not the least reluctant to pass on the most venomous personal attacks. They receive a mass e-mail that gibes with their opinion, suspend any skepticism or sense of civility, and speed it on.
They become a mob with a computer keyboard instead of a brickbat.
I find it curious, too, that so many of the people who do that are the same ones who rail against the so-called mainstream media for being unfair or inaccurate. They want publishers to be fair and accurate, but assume no responsibility for being the same. Yet when they click on the send button, they have become publishers themselves.
So many of the things you receive don’t tell you who originated them or where the purported facts came from.
I have recalled more than once my days as a young reporter. Objectivity was the goal – whether anyone can be truly objective is a matter for another column – and reporters were not only supposed to tell the reader where the information in the story came from, they also were to keep their personal opinions out.
No one wanted to have a story that he’d written returned with a terse “Says who?” scrawled in red grease pencil at the top and an offending sentence circled. Attribution was the name of the game, whether it was an opinion or a “fact” that might be disputed.
I wish those people busy forwarding e-mails would more often take time to ask, “says who?”
Even if you know where the piece you’re reading originated, the “says who?” question often goes unanswered.
I received in a mass e-mail the other day a particularly odious piece about presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama. It was a sort of John Birch Society meets the Ku Klux Klan. It did not take long to figure out that the writer made no pretense to being “fair and balanced” or that he was satisfied with planting innuendo in the form of questions.
That was only one of many venomous pieces about Obama circulating, and it is not surprising that The Washington Post reported the other day that his victory has been marked by an increase in racist and white supremacist activity, mainly on the Internet.
None of this is really new. The poison pen has a long history in American politics.
Thomas Jefferson paid notorious propagandist James Callender to pen the most vicious attacks on John Adams. (Callender later turned on Jefferson and circulated the stories about Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings.)
The big difference between then and now, though, is that the poison pen artist has thousands of willing accomplices, and lies can circulate at the speed of light.
Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com
