Don’t Trust Every Word
An old adage has it that one should not trust everything one reads in the press. This holds true even more for information obtained from the Internet.
Social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, are good ways of receiving information through shared items of interest which one might not have been alert to otherwise. The downside is that often this information is unreliable.
So it is with an image of Pope Francis featuring a quote attributed to him which is wholly false.
According to the image, the pope says, among other things, that “the traditional notion of God is outdated. One can be spiritual but not religious.”
This hoax, which attributes ideas to the Holy Father which he most certainly does not hold, is being disseminated by people in good faith.
The lines between fact and fiction become further blurred by the growth of satirical websites that are designed to look like news sites, leading the casual reader to believe that invented news stories are authentic.
Internet users may also receive dubious information from clickbait sites, sites that look independent but are selling a product or an idea, and sites that exist to further an agenda.
Some websites can be trusted, others can not — but it is difficult to tell the questionable and more credible sites apart.
It is easier to do so with the traditional media. With regular exposure to a publication or broadcaster, one gets a sense of its philosophy, vision, biases and direction, and of its reliability as conveyor of trustworthy news.
Where many websites have little or no editorial control, the content of publications and broadcast news is subject to the control of an editorial team.
Though editorial control does not guarantee quality or accurate reporting, consumers of these media and subjects of stories have recourse to holding an editor accountable for journalistic lapses.
Many websites have similar editorial filters, but many others don’t. So it is good to make regular use of trusted websites and to monitor whether their content remains dependable.
But one must take great care with unknown websites which one lands on through shared links or search engines.
This requires a measure of media literacy — the ability to differentiate between websites (or traditional media) that can be believed and those that do not merit our unreserved confidence.
That isn’t always easy. Witness, for example, the report on the “Vatican Insider” blog of a purported letter to Pope Francis signed by 13 cardinals who had concerns about procedural aspects of the Synod of Bishops on the Family.
The story was a big deal, and it was tricky to know whether the story had merit.
On the one hand, it was broken by a blog that is known to have well-placed sources in the Vatican. On the other hand, it is also known that the blog has a record of publishing inaccurate or disputed stories in the past, had been banned from the Vatican earlier this year, and is known to be stridently critical of Pope Francis.
In the event, several supposed signatories said they never signed such a letter, and others who had signed it, including Cardinal Wilfrid Napier, said that the letter published on the blog was not the same as was sent to the pope.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation who is said to have signed the letter, said that the leak of the purported letter (and presumably its publication) was intended to sow discord and division in the synod, pitting the signatories against the pope.
This illustrates the need to evaluate all our sources for news and analysis.
We must interrogate the sources of what we read by asking these questions: Do I know the publishers (website, newspaper, radio station) of the news I am receiving? Can I trust them? How or through whom did I discover them? Might they have an agenda (ideological or commercial) which influences what they publish and how they do so? Is the content plausible, and the fact verifiable?
If we are unsure of the answers to any of these questions, we must exercise caution in trusting what we read.
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