One of the things that distinguishes a blawg is that it relies on news media as a source of information. Sure, there are times when a blawg initiates a story, particularly about a legal opinion or court occurrence, but bigger stories come from bigger media.  And a blawger’s view is only as good as the information provided by the trusted source.

Like, oh, say Greta Van Susteren, Slate or Newsweek, all of whom were taken in by Patrick @Popehat’s hilarious parody twitter account DPRK News Service.  This was a funny example of how confirmation bias, rush to reportage and the utter lack of fact-checking plays out.  Less funny was Baltimore FOX affiliate’s WBFF report of protestors chanting “kill the cops.”

Last night, Baltimore’s WBFF aired a video of protesters chanting “kill a cop”– evidence, it claimed, of murderously violent rhetoric on the part of anti-brutality protesters in Washington, D.C. The only problem? The protesters weren’t chanting “kill a cop” at all, and there’s video evidence to prove it.

At a time when overheated rhetoric spawns violent reactions, this was the sort of monumentally irresponsible reporting the leads to bloodshed.

More pedestrian “bad reporting” is pervasive. The myth of the story, such as the “loosies” claim attached to Eric Garner despite there having been neither claim nor evidence that it was the case at the outset, is now so firmly embedded in the story that no subsequent story was reported without its mention.  The myth becomes as much of the story as fact by mere repetition.

In the effort to try not to make anyone stupider, vetting stories by both sources and content is a necessity.  There are a great many putative news sources on the internets, and while they may offer extremely interesting content, its value and accuracy is often a shot in the dark.  People often send over some really curious links which, if true, would be worthy of comment. Whether they’re true, on the other hand, is an unknown.  Or, even more likely, how true; some are based on real occurrences, but insert extremely significant details that can’t be verified elsewhere.

This doesn’t make them wrong, or false.  It just doesn’t make them true.  And that creates a conundrum. Write about it?  Note it?  Offer it as evidence of a point, only to learn later that it not only fails to prove the point, but proves the opposite?  It may be easier to apologize than ask for permission, but apologies really aren’t the way to prevent making people stupider in the first place.

When SJ was in its infancy, a post of mine was picked up at Volokh Conspiracy, which was already a well-established blog, by Orin Kerr, who wrote:

Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield has an astonishing post about a criminal case that deserves much wider attention: People v. Flores, in which a defendant was accidentally convicted of murder and then sentenced for murder even though the murder charge had already been dismissed. If the facts of Scott’s post check out, this case is an unbelievable story of ineptness and prosecutorial abuse.

At the time, I was pretty damned offended by Orin’s inclusion of the words, “if the facts of Scott’s post check out,” as if I would make this stuff up.  I soon came to realize that Orin had no reason to credit me and was right to include that caveat; I was just one of many who had a keyboard and wrote stuff on the internet. Was I credible or totally full of it? How would he know?  Of course, the court decision was something of a giveaway, but then, the question was about me, not the opinion.

As the UVA rape story made overwhelmingly clear, not only are stories of great outrage sometimes unreliable ab initio, but many don’t really give a damn whether they’re true or not, or accurately reported even if the underlying story is based on something that really happened.  For many, it’s become more important that the story, whether fact or fiction, supports their belief, and if so, then it’s truthy enough for them.

Not only is the story, with all its sordid details, internalized to the point where people argue it as if they were eyewitnesses to events, but it becomes a foundation for broader truths.  A story about police misconduct becomes a basis to inductively conclude that all cops are storm troopers. This happens here constantly, even though you don’t see it as comments to that effect rarely make it to the surface.

Even trusted sources can get it wrong.  Whether it’s the time when Turk’s April Fool’s gag of all time pwned the New York Times, or its persistence in spreading the Eric Garner loosies myth, reliability must always be questioned.  Just because something is in writing doesn’t make it true.  Not in its entirety, and certainly not in its details.  Not even if you agree with it.

What appears here is only as good as its sources, and vetted through my experience in the trenches over more than 30 years.  That means the information that doesn’t pass my BS detector may be presented as dubious, or not presented at all. It doesn’t make me right, or any more accurate than any other source, but it’s the best I can offer. Be skeptical of all reporting and commentary, including here.