One of the favourite observations of journalists who feel threatened by the changing face of news on the Internet is that the net all too often becomes a breeding ground for rumours and conspiracy theories.
Any large-scale tragedy invites speculation on the \'story behind the story.' Unsurprisingly, the recent terrorist attacks in the US have provided ample fodder for urban legends, crackpot conspiracies, and apocalyptic speculation. What is unusual about the rumours swirling over the Internet now is that they have an appeal far beyond the ordinary audience of fanatics and conspiracy theorists. As Janelle Brown observes in Salon.com's rumour roundup, "The kooks are coming out of the woodwork." Bridget Harrison of PageSix.com, complains that her inbox is flooded with "doomsday predictions, conspiracy theories and rants about religion and the future of the planet," and asks, "Where do they all come from? It's as if we're living in a medieval village where guessing and gossip pass for knowledge."
How far have we come from the medieval village to the global village? And, just how many "kooks"-global village idiots-are out there on the net? Stories that most regular email users have encountered recently include:
. a Nostradamus prophecy \'anticipating' the WTC attack;
. a coded message predicting the attack in a Microsoft graphics font;
. 4,000 Jews told not to go to the WTC the day of the attack;
. footage of Palestinians celebrating in Jerusalem was ten-year-old CNN stock footage;
. photos of the burning buildings reveal Satan's face in the smoke;
. a man in the WTC rode bits of the falling building down to safety;
. an unburned Bible was found in the wreckage of the Pentagon.
Aided by the Internet, these rumours (all subsequently proven false) proliferated at an astounding rate. The day after 11 September, over one hundred of the 120 students in my class at Annenberg had received e-mails containing the Nostradamus \'prophecy': "In York there will be a great collapse, Two twin brothers torn apart by chaos, while the fortress falls the great leader will succumb. The third big war begins when the big city is burning. Nostradamus, 1654"
Newspapers debunked the story, noting that Nostradamus died in 1566. About.com and other sites featured stories proving that the verses originated in a 1997 essay, published on the web by a college student parodying the vague language and mystical obscurity of Nostradamus's writings. But this seems to have had little impact. On 15 Septmeber, the bestselling book on Amazon.com was Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies.
Internet columnist Aaron Schatz, who surveys fluctuating requests for information on Lycos, reported that "Nostradamus searches increased, despite media outlets reporting on [the prophecy's] fallacy." It's difficult to impute significance to such data, but the implications are disturbing: it seems the experts who debunked the prophecy were no match for people's hunger to find supernatural significance, in forged verses from a famously obscure sixteenth-century mystic or in the arcane codings of software engineers. The rapidity with which these stories have gained credibility among ordinarily sensible folk indicates that the impact of the terrorist attacks is several orders of magnitude above any news story since the Internet.
To understand the credibility of these stories, we might think of them as modern folklore, generated by new technologies but serving an ancient function. Legends, rumours, and spurious prophecies are important: they help people come to grips with tragedy and historical change, bringing order out of chaos, giving meaning to apparently meaningless violence, and reassuring us with tales of survival.
It may be hard for journalists to understand that in crises, the social functions of rumour are virtually indistinguishable from those of "real news." People spread rumours for the same reason they read the papers or watch CNN: they are trying to make sense of their world.
The Internet is ideal for the spawning and evolving of propaganda, disinformation, and collective mythologies, which provide ideological support for religious fanatics and secular nationalists. Journalists may report on rumours to debunk them, but even the most sceptical reporters cannot avoid spreading false stories to credulous people. It hardly matters how strongly we resist being drawn into disseminating propaganda and rumour; in such an emotional context, our work inevitably contributes to the evolving of cultural myths. How will this kind of mythmaking in the global village respond to, and affect, the conflict?
(Online Journalism Review, Annenberg School of Communication, USC)
Alternative sources
The Iraqis are training bin Laden's troops in chemical and biological weapons; Russian commandos packing newly acquired American arms are poised to storm Afghanistan; Israel is about to be charged with damaging the mosques on Jerusalem's contested Temple Mount.
Stories like these are making the Israeli news site Debkafile increasingly popular with Americans looking for the inside scoop on the new conflict. Debkafile offers anonymous tips, unsubstantiated rumours and chilling, detail-laden stories on Middle Eastern military, intelligence, diplomatic, and terrorist matters. And it is beating big-name American and international news sources on key stories, attracting flocks of new readers in the process. Daily visitors to the site have increased threefold in the last month to 120,000, says Debkafile editor and former Economist foreign affairs reporter Giora Shamis. Americans now make up 60 percent of Debka's audience, compared with 45 percent before the crisis. John Ghazivinian, editor at the news professionals' site Mediabistro, says, "There's a strong sense that the mainstream media have scaled back operations and are incapable of covering this from the ground."
Debkafile gets that kind of coverage. It reported days before USA Today, CNN and NBC that American and British forces were in Afghanistan scouting out terrorist hiding places, and included details about Russian intelligence officers and German commandos joining in the incursions. Earlier, two days before the New York Times, Debkafile ran a story that Saudi Arabia had refused to let the US use its air bases to stage attacks on Afghanistan.
Debkafile reports with a point of view--the site is unabashedly in the hawkish camp of Israeli politics. That slant, and Debkafile's breakneck pace-its eight-person staff updates the site five or six times a day with terse, one-line tips and sparse news briefs-means it often airs unfounded, inaccurate rumours while breaking legitimate news.
There are some missteps, such as Debkafile's about turn on its initial position that the Siberian Airways Tel Aviv-Novosibirsk flight crash was the result of terrorist action, but they don't to bother the site's increasingly loyal readers. "Not everything Debka says is confirmed, but three days later you'll find at least one item in The New York Times," said Greg Clayman, a New York City Internet marketing executive. "When (White House press secretary) Ari Fleischer tells the mainstream media, \'Watch what you say,' you've got to look for other sources." (Wired)
