How do you know if it’s true?

September 9th, 2008 at 12:29pm Linda Grist Cunningham

Be oh, so careful about believing what you read on the Web. Ditto for anything forwarded to you in an e-mail — even from a trusted friend or family member. And, as much as some folks love to hate the mainstream media, most of us live by this mantra: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

United Airlines stockholders learned that lesson the hard way on Monday morning when their stocks tumbled 75 percent in just a few hours. UAL stock prices dropped to $3 per share from around $12 a share on “news” that the airline giant had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy — again. In a nutshell, here’s what happened: A researcher thought he/she had spotted a “breaking news” story on a Florida newspaper Web site. The story, which was about the 2002 bankruptcy, was reposted out of the newspaper’s archives by the researcher as a new story, and the Web world went “viral.” (That means information takes on a life of its own and is spread far and wide, either by individuals, or by mechanical things called “bots.” You don’t need to know the technical stuff; just think of it as neighbors gossiping until “everyone” knows a bunch of different versions of the facts. ChicagoTribune.com has a terrific explanation of exactly what happened if you’re interested.)

Less dramatic, but far more common, are the “I know it’s true because my brother sent it to me” stuff that anyone with an e-mail address gets. The most are two common kinds of “must be true” e-mails: (1) political stuff (Barack Obama has relatives in Africa who are terrorists; Sarah Palin faked her latest pregnancy and the child is really her daughter’s); and (2) sweetness-and-light (American soliders in Iraq tell it like it really is; David Letterman/Jay Leno celebrate the good things about America). I get dozens of these things forwarded to me by good-hearted — and not so — readers and family members who want me to be in the know.

A quick check of Snopes.com almost always shows these things to be just so much garbage, even the sweetness-and-light ones that bring a smile to your face and a warm fuzzy to your heart. Check ‘em out, even if they come from your mother.

So, how do you know it’s true? Three quick steps weed out the most egregious. First, check Snopes.com. It’s a great site for debunking or affirming most of the forwarded e-mails that purport to be the truth. Second, do some homework. Research multiple sources. While one source might be right, seeing if multiple sources say the same or similar things is best. That’s what we do at the News Tower; we need more than a single source for most everything we publish. And, third,  swallow a healthy spoonful of skepticism. If it sounds too good, too off-the-wall, too bad, or simply too perfect or too awful, it probably is.

And, one last safety net: Don’t sell all your stock in a panic.

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