The dangerous
difference between Libraries and the Web:
WHEN INTEGRITY GOES MISSING
By
Jim Trelease © 2007
henever libraries
and the World Wide Web are compared, a long-standing
criticism of the Internet is its dangerous lack of authenticity.
The real is mixed with the make-believe, unlike a newspaper
or magazine which is required to separate its ads from
news text with the label "advertisement" running
over and below the ad. On the Web, anyone can say anything—be
it true or false—and it becomes commonly accepted
knowledge within minutes because "I saw it on the
Internet." There
is no label "conjecture" or "rumor" attached,
although in some cases it should be, as you'll read in moment.
While publishers are subject
to lawsuits of every kind and thus require extensive vetting
by in-house lawyers before publication, the Web's unwieldy
size and anonymity usually gets it free pass.
KrugmanOne
of my favorite examples of
this is the sad case of 12-year-old
Graeme Frost. In the fall of 2007, President
Bush vetoed the bipartisan expansion of the State Children’s
Health Insurance Program (S-chip) and addressed his reasons
for doing so during his weekly Saturday morning radio address.
As usual, the Democrats were given equal time for response
and they used young Graeme Frost and his family's plight
as response.
Now let Paul
Krugman pick
up the tale. Krugman is a columnist on the Op-Ed page of
The New York Times while
also holding the position of professor of economics and
international affairs at Princeton University. He has
a B.A. from Yale, a Ph.D. from MIT and has taught at
Yale, MIT and Stanford. Simply put, he is no lightweight.
In his Oct. 12, 2007 Times column ("Sliming
Graeme Frost"), Krugman
wrote:
Graeme, who along with
his sister received severe brain injuries in a 2004 car
crash and continues to need physical therapy, is a beneficiary
of the State Children’s
Health Insurance Program. Mr. Bush has vetoed a bipartisan
bill that would have expanded that program to cover millions
of children who would otherwise have been uninsured.
What
followed should serve as a teaching moment.
First, some
background. The Frosts and their four children are exactly
the kind of people S-chip was intended to help: working
Americans who can’t afford private health
insurance.
The parents have a combined
income of about $45,000, and don’t receive health
insurance from employers. When they looked into buying
insurance on their own before the accident, they found
that it would cost $1,200 a month — a
prohibitive sum given their income. After the accident,
when their children needed expensive care, they couldn’t
get insurance at any price.
Fortunately, they received
help from Maryland’s S-chip
program. The state has relatively restrictive rules for
eligibility: children must come from a family with an income
under 200 percent of the poverty line. For families with
four children that’s $55,220, so the Frosts clearly
qualified.
Graeme Frost, then,
is exactly the kind of child the program is intended
to help. But that didn’t
stop the right from mounting an all-out smear campaign
against him and his family.
Soon after the radio
address, right-wing bloggers began insisting that the
Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister
attend private schools (they’re on
scholarship), because they have a house in a neighborhood
where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought
their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood
was rundown and considered dangerous) and because Mr.
Frost owns a business (it was dissolved in 1999).
You might be
tempted to say that bloggers make unfounded accusations
all the time. But we’re not talking about
some obscure fringe. The charge was led by Michelle Malkin,
who according to Technorati has the most-trafficked right-wing
blog on the Internet, and in addition to blogging has
a nationally syndicated column, writes for National Review
and is a frequent guest on Fox News.
The attack on Graeme’s
family was also quickly picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who
is so important a player in the right-wing universe that
he has had multiple exclusive interviews with Vice President
Dick Cheney. . .
And the attempt to spin
the media worked, to some extent: despite reporting that
has thoroughly debunked the smears, a CNN report yesterday
suggested that the Democrats had made “a tactical
error in holding up Graeme as their poster child,” and
closely echoed the language of the e-mail from Mr. McConnell’s
office.
Freedom but without responsibility
All of this from the erroneous
assumptions of a blogger and her subscribers who hadn't
done their homework but were able to publish and propagate
their mistakes instantaneously for world-wide consumption.
What the case cried out for was fact-checkers like you
find in publishing houses but seldom find on the World
Wide Web.
Freedom of speech is
more alive on the Web than anywhere or at any time in in
the world, but it is also free of
responsibility to be honest and
certain before publishing.
Perhaps the
first sign of the Web's maturity will be when lawyers find
a way to harness the Web's size and bring libel suits against
the offenders. The possible loss of money does have a way
of sobering people's passions. In the meantime, the Graeme
Frosts and daily truth will continue to be "slimed" at
will. However, Graeme Frost is the perfect cautionary
tale for use in classrooms and school libraries for young
people who think they can get instant-truth by "Googling" or "You-tubing."
