unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [64]
• Who are the people? Sometimes the people at an organization are a clue to what’s up. The Center for American Progress describes itself as “a nonpartisan research and educational institute,” for example, but the people behind it amount to a Democratic administration in exile. CAP’s president and CEO is John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton’s last White House chief of staff, and top positions are filled almost exclusively by Democrats, including former aides to Clinton, Senator Ted Kennedy, and former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. That doesn’t look very “nonpartisan” to us. Contrast that group to the Institute for International Economics, a leading think tank on the global economy. It professes to be “nonpartisan” and really is. Its board of directors includes many big names from both major parties: its chairman is Peter G. Peterson, a Republican who was once secretary of commerce under Richard Nixon, and another member is former senator Bill Bradley, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. The same goes for Resources for the Future, an environmental think tank headed by former Democratic congressman Phil Sharp of Indiana, but which also has a genuinely bipartisan board including such well-known Republicans as R. Glenn Hubbard, former head of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, and former representative Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania.
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False Quotes
The Internet teems with unverified “quotes” supposedly uttered by famous people. Some of these attributions, perhaps many, are false.
For example, we heard a nice remark by Albert Einstein that we thought might fit in this book: “Information is not knowledge.” We take that to mean that raw facts mean little unless we validate them, think about them logically, and follow them to a valid conclusion. Sage advice, but none of the many Internet citations we found told us when the great physicist gave it, or where, or to whom. Did he say it in a lecture, a book, a letter to a colleague, or an interview? Was it a casual remark to a friend or colleague, who mentioned it later in his or her own writings?
We checked with Barbara Wolff at the Albert Einstein Archives of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, where the physicist’s surviving personal papers and writings are housed. She told us: “The quote in question is not known to me, and was not found among Einstein’s identifiable quotes.”
How could so many people make the mistake of falsely attributing the words to Einstein? Ms. Wolff has a theory, with which we agree: “As, unfortunately, it happens again and again, someone might have composed a more or less meaningful aphorism, and, anticipating that his own name would not draw attention to it, simply foisted it on Einstein.” Be careful about any quotation whose source can’t be verified. Sometimes the person quoted never really said it.
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There are other tests you can use to evaluate a website. Is the information current? Check when the page you are reading was last updated. Some sites haven’t been kept up for years, yet remain on the Internet like a virtual ghost town. Do obvious misspellings, grammatical mistakes, or other errors demonstrate a general carelessness? Is the writing clear and easy to understand? Does the author have sufficient education or background? If the author is stating opinions, are they clearly labeled as such? Does the website correct its own errors openly? Is the author plagiarizing? (You can check for that by plugging any unusual phrases into your search engine to see where else they might pop up.)
Finding the good stuff on the Web is a skill that grows with experience. As a start, try looking for information about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One of the sites an Internet search for his name brings up as we write this is actually