America Responds to Hoaxes

Three nights after the World Trade Center attacks, countless Americans across the country stood in the darkness, holding candles. "NASA has asked that everyone step out on their lawns tonight and light a candle," an email had informed them. "They will be positioning a satellite to take a picture of the U.S. and posting it on the news tomorrow morning." Though the email was a hoax, people across the country stood in the darkness with lit candles, convinced they were part of something larger. And of course, they were. America's response to the overwhelming flood of information -- and misinformation -- which followed in the wake of September 11.

"I think that we're working through some tremendous changes in our country," remembers Steve Knagg. "A lot of the information that we first received about the bombings, things the next day, two days later, you'd find out were completely wrong." But the problem may not be too little information, but too much. "I don't think it's intentional by the media to mislead anyone. I just think that with this much news breaking this quickly it must be exceedingly difficult to get it right the first time every time."

Knagg has some experience at his job as Communications Director for the Garland Independent school district in a suburb of Texas. A fifth-grade student there had told their teacher -- the day before the attacks -- that World War III would be started in the United States on Sept. 11. "That was the intial report we got," Knagg remembers. It illustrates how the attacks magnified the significance of the otherwise trivial -- including even the words of 11-year-olds. The teacher hadn't thought much of it at the time. ("That was a different world on the 10th," remembers Knagg.) But after the attacks, confronted with remarks that seemed strangely prophetic, the school contacted the FBI. "When we hear something like that, we want it investigated," Knagg explains. "We want to know. The world's just that weird now." And there was one more twist to the story. "The boy was living in an apartment complex in our district that was scheduled for renovation, so EVERYBODY there had to move out a week after the bombing in New York and find a different place to live. So the story went out that now the kid has disappeared!"

"That's not what happened; his parents just moved to some other district in the Dallas area."

But after further investigation, the events seemed less dramatic. "The teacher was not completely convinced she remembered the boy saying that World War III would start TOMORROW," says Knagg, "which kind of changes the newsworthiness of the story!" Last week the FBI's investigators concluded there was nothing there, the Houston Chronicle reported. And Knagg points out the ultimate irony. Since news accounts of the "prophecy" didn't run in the Dallas newspaper -- just a few radio reports, and one on TV -- "I'm still not sure today if the student and the parents are even aware that this story has been written!"

Some misinformation can be even more disturbing. The New York Times reported that in the wake of the attacks hundreds of New Yorkers received an email claiming (falsely) that the city's water might be poisoned. Days later the Times reported on false bomb threats and other hoaxes that had required the Sears Tower be evacauted. The L.A. Times uncovered even more disturbing rumors in Pakistan. The paper estimates millions in the badly-educated and often illiterate population of Pakistan subscribe to a variety of counter-theories about the World Trade Center attacks -- that the buildings were struck by empty airplanes flown by remote control. That 4,000 Jews were forewarned, and avoided the building that day. Some theorists even pointed the finger at Al Gore.