By Tom Dodge
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-967629.mp3
Dallas, TX –
The Internet has a wealth of content on seemingly just about any subject. But commentator Tom Dodge warns be careful about the content you find.
On the old police show, Dragnet, Sgt. Friday often interrupted witnesses venturing into gossip or speculation by saying, "Just the facts, ma'am." I suppose facts were important once. Today, as Cole Porter said, "Anything Goes." Like a potential presidential candidate's saying that John Adams ended slavery or the battles of Lexington and Concord were fought in New Hampshire.
Everyone has received forwarded e-mails containing preposterous misinformation. Fact-checking websites like Snopes.com can't keep up with the exaggerations, prevarications, plagiarisms, bogus quotations, and cybernetic flapdoodle. I myself can spot them within seconds. It's easy. If it explains how everything bad is the fault of the weakest members of society, it's a lie.
Another example: On the first day of school a new principal supposedly named Dennis Prager of Redding, California, supposedly berated his students and faculty about morals, propriety, attire, and decorum in the most indecorous and improper manner imaginable. This greatly thrilled prior recipients, some saying, "Prager for President!"
Well, of course, this was labeled false on Snopes.com Dennis Prager is, first of all, a real person and may have said these things. Then, someone simply made him a school principal and shot the nonsense out into cyberspace and thousands forwarded it to accomplices in the hoax with addenda in all caps like "THIS IS INCREDIBLE!"
Yes, it is incredible - because it isn't true.
Columnist Thomas Frank addresses fact-devaluation in the April 2011, issue of Harper's. He centers on Tea Party factophobes' fascination with re-writing history and their strange notion that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who were scholars, rationalists, and religious skeptics, would somehow be on their side. Frank quotes from a 1989 book, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions by TCU professor Paul Boller, Jr. and co-author John George, who explain that "quote-fakers" rearrange ideas and events as they wish them to be and attribute them to eminent people like Jefferson because they feel obliged to save modern Americans from the troublesome facts of history and from cynical media.
Just literary cosmetic surgery, you might say.
Regarding Professor Boller, while fact-checking the title of his book, I noticed his letter to the editor of TCU's newspaper The Skiff, in which he refuted a spurious quotation attributed to George Washington in a column about, you guessed it, "the Founding Fathers." In a speech to Congress, January 7, 1790, Washington supposedly said something about firearms being "next in importance to the Constitution itself."
Professor Boller explained that, "Washington did not speak to Congress that day, but he did deliver his first annual message to Congress the following day, and [this quote does] not appear in that address, nor in any other address Washington made during his many years of service as Army chief and president."
It's nice to know that somebody besides me refutes the spuriosa, this gangland of truth forgers and counterfeiters. How can things improve otherwise? I've done it hundreds of times. As a result I have but one steadfast correspondent who I suspect hopes to eventually lead me to the untruth. Once, he said I was "too hung up on facts" and must "have a case of OCD."
This, I am given to understand, means Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. So, should Dragnet be revived for TV, Sgt. Friday would probably be adjured to avoid the appearance of mental illness by saying instead, "Just give me your beliefs, ma'am."
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.
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