Careful what you read on the Internet

The great thing about the Internet is that it gives us instant access to all sorts of information: reviews of restaurants we might patronise, tips on how to remove red wine stains from white carpets, all kinds of celebrity gossip, latest scores from Norway’s football league, and more news than you could ever digest.

Recently The Southern Cross made minor news on the Internet — and the episode shows how news on the Web is more a game of Chinese Whispers than it is in the traditional (and not always blame-free) business of newspapers and broadcasters.

Our editorial two weeks ago, which criticised anti-gay legislation in some African countries, was first picked up by Fides, the news agency of the Vatican’s missionary congregation.

The brief report quoted the editorial as saying that the anti-gay laws are not just about criminalising homosexual acts, which already are illegal in most African countries, and that such legislation violates the Catechism of the Catholic Church’s opposition to “every sign of unjust discrimination” against homosexuals.

The Fides report also quoted the editorial’s call on Africa’s bishops to stand “against discriminatory laws and violence against homosexuals, many of whom are Catholics”.

Fides described The Southern Cross as being “promoted” by the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC). It’s a fair way of describing the relationship — there is much mutual cooperation between us and the SACBC — but it’s also a word that can easily be misinterpreted.

The Southern Cross is published independently and without any subsidy. Since the newspaper was established in 1920, the SACBC has owned 51% of the newspaper in founders’ shares. But it is not the publisher, and The Southern Cross is not the local Church’s official “mouthpiece”.

But that’s not how some Internet reports read things. A conservative Catholic website in the US called Spero News headlined their otherwise accurate report: “Catholic bishops of Southern Africa denounce laws discriminating against homosexuals”.

Of course, the bishops of Southern Africa have not done any such thing, though I’m sure that they too are disturbed by reports of homosexuals being arrested for being gay, or a man being publicly flogged for having had sex with another man.

But The Southern Cross is not “a weekly newspaper published by the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference”, as Spero News put it.

To present the position taken by this newspaper as that of the bishops’ conference is not only distorting the facts, but could create delicate situations for bishops who prefer not to be on the record as standing in conflict with their brother bishops in other countries.

We politely asked Spero News to correct their factual error. Our request was ignored.

Meanwhile, a blog run by the respected Vaticanologist Sandro Magister for the Italian weekly news magazine L’Espresso took the view that Fides’ used the Southern Cross editorial to make a point.

Fides carried the report on the editorial, but not the news two days earlier of a Nigerian bishop congratulating his government for outlawing same-sex marriage (which, incidentally, nobody even campaigned for there and isn’t the limit of the country’s anti-gay law). Mr Magister therefore deduced that in doing so the Vatican’s missionary congregation, whose remit includes the African Church, had registered its opposition to the anti-gay laws. He might even be right.

Mr Magister has delivered a few Vatican scoops in his time. So it was more than puzzling that his article referred to Fides as the news agency of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), not that of the Congregation for Evangelisation.

I presume it was an error born of a lapse in concentration. But the distinction is important. If the publication of an article on The Southern Cross’ editorial indeed implies Vatican consent to its substance, as Mr Magister suggests, then that in itself is significant. But if the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation were to make it a point of opposing the persecution of homosexuals, then that would be very big news indeed.

Of course, the CDF (nor the SACBC) has made known its views on African anti-gay laws. And yet, there it is on the Web, eternally preserved in the Internet’s caches.

As long as these reports remain unedited, people will be able to form their opinions on account of erroneous information on the websites of L’Espresso and Spero News, and those who copy and paste from them. Future researchers might stumble on these articles through Google, and ascribe to the bishops of Southern Africa and the CDF positions they neither stated nor necessarily occupied.

I offer this experience, which in the scale of things is minor, as an example of how errors — sloppy or calculated — can twist our perception of the facts.

The same is true, of course, about print and broadcast media, though these organs usually have a hierarchy of professionals tasked with maintaining basic journalistic standards. These standards are not universally applied with the same vigour, and sometimes not at all, but the general ethic still represents a benchmark that has not been fully translated on to the Internet.

All this ought to give us pause to reflect on the news we receive from the Internet, where editorial control is much more lax than it is in newspapers, where editorial accountability to sources and readers is often absent, and where even Vatican experts confuse the Roman curia’s doctrinal and missionary congregations.

Our reliance on the Internet for information — on coffee stain-removal tips or hard news — will only intensify. But we cannot take it for granted that what we read on the Internet is reliable, not on Wikipedia and not on news sites.

We need to be media-savvy and discerning. And on news items that are important to us, we will need to be our own fact-checkers, because Internet sites simply cannot be trusted to fulfil that function for us.