SILICON LOUNGE: America the Gullible

Years ago as an Internet virgin, I learned quickly not to pass on urban legends. I naively forwarded that infamous cookie recipe to my address book. Several of my more cyber-experienced friends -- they'd been online several months longer -- in return harangued me for my gullibility.

They were right, of course. I needed to apply what I already knew as a journalist to my e-mail communications -- that is, you don't pass along information without checking its accuracy. Since then, I've tried to squish a number of stupid chain e-mails -- that one that says that Tommy Hillfiger made racist comments on Oprah, the one about the business-suited ax murderer at the Ohio mall, the one that says that Microsoft has racist phrases programmed into its spellchecker, and others.

Most took about five minutes with a search engine, or a visit to an urban-legend site like www.snopes.com, to dispel. Then I sent backward e-mails -- the only time those obnoxious e-mail address lists come in handy -- to warn previous receivers to hit delete, and even wrote columns about them.

I didn't bother to check out that patriotic Declaration of Independence diatribe I got a few weeks back. It's been around for a while. A thinly disguised cry by conservatives for protection of the right to pack arms, this urban legend gives a melodramatic description of what happened to the 56 signers of the Declaration, describing torture and capture by the British and forced poverty. I deleted it, being the type to worry about poor people who are still alive rather than passing along thin excuses to support the proliferation of assault weapons. And I figured the facts were probably cooked, as most chain e-mails are.

They were. The e-mail, posted all over the Web and variously attributed to a Gary Hildreth, Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey and various others, contains all sorts of inaccuracies and exaggerations. (See www.gomemphis.com/newca/viewpt/2mkcolm.htm for a good analysis.) But the e-mail has been reprinted all over -- and not just on personal Web sites that could care less about accuracy, but in print publications that supposedly fact-check stories before publishing.

Ann Landers reprinted the column, with a disclaimer saying it was from an anonymous reader. Jonah Goldberg grabbed it for National Review Online, and apparently ran several of the inaccurate sentences verbatim. And conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe rewrote it slightly, toning down the inaccuracies, and ran it as his words with no further attribution on July 3.

You might expect Matt Drudge to throw this e-mail up on his site, but plagiarism of an unsubstantiated urban legend is shocking, especially by newspapers that clearly can afford fact-checkers. And journalists don't need this problem: It's bad enough that many people -- often the same ones who mass-mail junk without question -- routinely accuse the Fourth Estate of blanket depravity. But to have syndicated columns in traditional print reprint urban legends as fact makes one wonder if print isn't absorbing the lazy habits of untrained cyberjournalists, rather than leading by example.

Upon discovering that Jacoby cribbed his column, the newspaper suspended him for four months without pay, as well they should. Sure, lines can be gray: Should a columnist report the original source for every news item we critique? I try to give credit where it's due, but know that I miss sometimes, or a newspaper edits out my attribution to save space. What about fact-checking? Regardless of effort, some inaccuracies get in on deadline, especially in papers that can't (or refuse to) afford fact-checkers. So I always notify my clients of corrections I discover -- but I can't guarantee that the papers make them. That's the harsh reality.