urban legends

After receiving a clearly propagandizing e-mail about Hillary Clinton's alleged defense of murderous Black Panther members during her Yale Law School days, I decided to look a little bit deeper. I'm not a big fan of Mrs. Clinton, but the e-mail was way too vociferous to be believable. A little googling revealed (in addition to an apparent advertising google bomb of sorts around the story's keywords) both this article at about.com and this report at snopes.com, confirming my skeptical intuition. Snopes.com is particularly cool, featuring a large archive examining different urban legends. It has a nice treatment of a similar e-mail regarding Jane Fonda's involvement with the North Vietnamese, and it doesn't speak well for Jane. What I really appreciate at this site (and of all good journalists and researchers) is the one thing that is missing from all the e-mail propaganda: the list of sources and attributions at the end.

The thought of the political powers that be using misinforming e-mails like this to influence the populace seems both alarming and quite probable. But it is just another brick in the wall of our current climate of misinformation, ranging from Fox News ("fair and balanced" my ass) through factually-challenged pundits and wanna-be journalists/historians like (the still admittedly enjoyable) Michael Moore and (the unabashedly false) Ann Coulter. Is it any wonder that level-headed Americans may be turning to British broadcasting for their news? But even underneath the skin of the most ardent skeptic, we must admit: we tend to believe that which agrees with us.