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True Headline Stories?
by T. Dave Gowan, Ph.D.
The Tallahassee Rifle and Pistol Club

We have in our rifle and pistol club in Tallahassee a gentleman who, once he discovered the internet, became interested in the operations of internet search tools like Google, NorthernLight, AltaVista, Hotbot, etc. He became an expert on using them.

We recently enabled a listserver for our club (RPCTalley@tfn.net) and others for interest groups within the club. I began to forward through these listservers messages from fssa-talk and some other listservers.

This gentleman became concerned several months ago, when a message about a news event was forwarded to him, and he questioned it. So he searched for the details in the report (the name of the school in which a firearms event supposedly happened, and the name of the school principal), and discovered the message was false.

Since then he has made it his practice to check every one I send him, and he still finds errors in some of the reports.

Can we do something? It doesn't help us as a community united together on a controversial issue, if we forward made-up stories, stories without fact in them, or stories without sufficient data in them to verify the stories (Re: the recent Toys-R-Us story). More than one of the problem articles were forwarded through fssa-talk from a web page, and the article on the web page had errors in it. Almost no articles scanned or retyped from printed news stories have errors, but when he (or I) go to the source (the newspaper itself), we frequently discover that someone along the chain of forwarders has done some "minor" editing without putting [ and ] characters around the text or acknowledging there has been some editing by the forwarder.

It hurts us when we forward such messages to people we want to read the article and believe it or reprint it (like our local newspaper), if we have not verified the article's origin, source, and name, and they discover errors in it when they check themselves (as any prudent editor does).

Some forwarders are much better than others about checking stuff, and especially are better about citing the ultimate (real) origin and authors of articles. Last night I had an interesting article forwarded to me, that cited as its origin a web page... Knowing these frequently have errors, I searched on that page for an original origin, and found another web page. I went to that one, and found the original source, a print newspaper in a medium sized town.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

We should:

  • Be sure we have the real author, and the real origin of the article or news report.
  • Check names of things, places and people in the local newspaper of the place where it supposedly happened.
  • Newspaper editors like to verify before they print. When I sent one of them a quote from a founding father, he asked me for a printed reference to check. If there is one, you should refer to it in the top of the message you forward.
  • How good should your citations and credit be? As good as a law journal's. For examples, go to the web site http://www.2ndlawlib.org/journals/ and read any of the law reviews there about the Second Amendment and RKBA.
  • Look for editing changes in the text made by email forwarders, and delete them. Don't dirty or misinterpret the author's work.
  • If the origin of the message you want to forward is names as a web page, go look at it, and find if there is a more original origin, especially a printed one.

Each of us should take a few minutes doing one or more of these things, before we forward a message to a group.

Remember: Sending an incorrect or modified article to someone you want to convince or print it, may forever taint you and whatever you send to them in the future.

KABA NOTE:  We welcome any type of training/guidance articles to publish to assist other gun owners in being effective and efficient in helping the cause.