ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 10, 1996 TAG: 9611110066
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHICAGO
TYPE: ANALYSIS
SOURCE: JAMES COATES CHICAGO TRIBUNE
PIERRE SALINGER made the mistake of believing on-line reports without double-checking the source. He's not alone.
For retired veteran ABC newsman Pierre Salinger, it was an on-line humiliation, a bogus story he got off the Internet and bought hook, line and sinker about the U.S. Navy being responsible for the July 17 explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the Long Island coast.
Salinger went public Friday with his account, which he said he got from sources in ``French security'' in Europe. It made headlines across the globe until Salinger was confronted with the fact a few hours later that he was quoting a long-discredited piece of Internet e-mail as his only source.
When shown a copy of the dubious document by a CNN news crew in France, Salinger, 71, said, ``Yes, that's it. That's the document. Where did you get it?''
The journalists got it where Salinger's unnamed source in French intelligence got it. They got it where hundreds of thousands of other people have encountered it.
They got it on the Internet's World Wide Web, the hottest property in electronic media, with unregulated ability to move any information - from anybody who cares to post it - across the globe at the speed of light.
Salinger's silicon-born chagrin is merely the latest outbreak of the disturbing new information-age phenomenon of bogus news, one that is coming under increasing scrutiny by social scientists, lawyers and academicians.
America is awash in a growing and often disruptive avalanche of false information that takes on a life of its own in the electronic ether of the Internet, talk radio and voice mail until it becomes impervious to denial and debunking.
``There is a very strong strain of media populism because of the Internet in today's society, and people grasp for these false stories because they think the Internet can be trusted more than can the major institutions of America,'' said Bernard Beck, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University.
``People like the notion of the jungle grapevine,'' Beck said. ``They take comfort in the idea that there are ways of passing information along that bypasses the establishment. It is very much in keeping with a general distrust of institutions we're seeing more and more in America.''
In the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing, many of the Internet's newsgroups and Web sites were filled with accounts of black helicopters, enemy troops secretly massing on the U.S. border with Mexico and other rumors frequently promoted by ultra right-wing members of various militia movements.
Unfounded tales of government plots that abound on the Internet are fueled at least in part by the memory of conspiracies that actually happened,such as Watergate and Iran-Contra.
Nonetheless, experts like Northwestern's Beck interviewed after the Salinger episode said they see a dramatic change in the amount of false information confronting Americans through the powers and growing popularity of the Internet.
They also warned that people are more inclined than ever to believe the falsehoods even as they arrive in unprecedented numbers.
Dan Polsby, a law professor at Northwestern University who was general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission during the Ford administration, said, ``There are all sorts of false stories on the Internet, and you can find all of them on the newsgroups,'' where Salinger's bogus e-mail first surfaced.
In the view of Polsby and others, there is a fantastic conspiracy to fit every world view. ``There are [false] rumors to meet the needs of old guys like me who are in the middle of road, and others for the paint-ball right-wingers and still others for the paranoid left-wingers,'' Polsby said.
Polsby, who is known as a strong advocate of constitutional liberties, is concerned that the confusion now rampant will lead to calls for censorship, which he opposes.
Other experts warned that it is unlikely that government will ever be able to stop the influx of falsehoods anyway.
William Berry, professor at the University of Illinois Institute for Communications Research, said that the chaos caused by Internet misinformation may eventually end as people learn to be just as skeptical of what they hear on line as they are about what they hear on the radio or on the commuter train.
``The Internet doesn't have a monopoly on false news,'' Berry said. ``In fact, sometimes the false news that gets spread on the Internet wouldn't go very far at all if it didn't get picked up by other media such as talk radio or cable television or other outlets.''
For example, Salinger, who once served as President Kennedy's press secretary, brought new life to the recycled story about Flight 800 because his allegations were picked up by wire services and television networks.
``Journalists are supposed to do things like check several sources before saying something is true based on just one source, and there are plenty of other rules like that,'' Berry said.
``People are going to learn to do with the Internet what they have traditionally done. If you get something on the Net, treat it like you got it anywhere else. Verify it. Make sure it's right before you say it.''
LENGTH: Medium: 98 linesby CNB