When I was a kid I occasionally heard someone say "don't believe everything that you read," but I assumed that that advice meant one of two things. The first was that you shouldn't adopt opinions just because you've seen them in print. That's a tough lesson for a kid to learn — kids are information sponges and tend to be particularly prone to internalize cues about the way things oughtta be. (Many of my friends have posted with bemusement about the way their preschoolers freak out and go crazy when they sense gender roles being violated: Girls can't wear pants!) The second was that scientific "facts" are always subject to change as new discoveries are made. This made perfect sense to me; I eagerly followed the progress of Voyager 2 and updated my charts of the various planets' number of moons accordingly. But the idea that a published book could simply be wrong about known facts? Scandalous!

What removed the scales from my eyes was, of all things, a book called The Comic Book Heroes, which purported to be a history of superhero comics from the Silver Age to the (then) present. I was reading along with great interest and then got to the part about Secret Wars, in which, the authors casually averred, the Wasp died. Buh? The Wasp didn't die in Secret Wars! I was dumbstruck. This wasn't a matter of interpretation, or a provisional claim based on incomplete data. All you have to do is read Secret Wars and you will see that the Wasp does not die. And it occurred to me — why should I believe anything else in this book? For that matter, how many other books contain claims that are just flat-out false? I mean, I knew a little something about the Marvel Comics superhero line of the 1980s and could therefore see that this book was incorrect. Nick Montfort knew a fair amount about the history of interactive fiction and could see that Snyder's book was incorrect. So how much of what we read because we don't know very much about the subject is filling our heads with garbage data?

I bring this up because the newspaper industry is currently dying. With the rise of the web, newspaper subscription numbers have been tanking, staffs are being slashed, and some papers have been shuttered entirely. I've been getting my news online for fifteen years now and so I have mostly just kind of shrugged at this trend. The newspaper industry has responded to me and others like me with two refrains:

So where are you getting your news? Blogs? They're biased! Well, yeah. I would rather get my news from a source that states its bias right up front than from one that pretends that its corporate agenda and attachment to the status quo constitute objectivity, or one that adheres to the notion that "balance" means transcribing one side's true claims and the other's false claims and passing them on to the public without comment.

Yeah, well, blogs aren't as carefully fact-checked as newspapers! They post all sorts of error-filled and just plain made-up shit! They do. And so do traditional news media.

Most people who've been interviewed by newspapers will tell you some variation of the same story: "Yeah, I talked to the reporter for half an hour... and everything I said wound up whittled down to one line. Which was actually just a paraphrase of what I said. And was taken out of context to suggest the opposite of the point I was making." And that's actually one of the better outcomes! A few years ago I was thrilled to discover that the bestselling newspaper in Germany, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, had devoted a feature to my webcomic Academy X. Included were many quotes from penciler/inker Rob Wheeler. I asked why he hadn't told me about being interviewed by a German newspaper. He said he hadn't been. Oh, so they had just yanked the quotes from his web site or something? We ran the article through some translation software. And it turned out that the author, Jürgen Schmieder, had misunderstood the premise of the story — he thought it was about a school devoted to training superhero sidekicks. And here was Rob backing up the author's misreading with quotes! This guy had simply made up quotes out of whole cloth and attributed them to Rob!

So this evening Lizzie and I got back from Zachary's and I headed over to Facebook to see what was new among my various acquaintances. A friend of mine from grad school, Deep Singh, reported that he had been interviewed by a reporter with the Associated Press about a girl, the daughter of an Indian Sikh and an American Mormon, who had been kicked out of her middle school in Bountiful, Utah, for wearing a nose ring. Seems reasonable — Deep is a professor at a respected university who writes about, among many other things, South Asian identity in the U.S., so why not get his opinion? There's just one problem. I'll let Jesse Washington of the AP have the floor:

"I wanted to feel more closer to my family in India because I really love my family," said Suzannah, who was born in Bountiful. Her father was born in India as a member of the Sikh religion. "I just thought it would be OK to let her embrace her heritage and her culture," said Suzannah's mother, Shirley Pabla, a Mormon born in nearby Salt Lake City. "I didn't know it would be such a big deal." It shouldn't have been, said Suzannah's father, Amardeep Singh, a Sikh who was raised in the United States and works as an English professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. "It's true that the nose ring is mainly a cultural thing for most Indians," Singh said. "Even if it is just culture, culture matters. And her right to express or explore it seems to me at least as important as her right to express her religious identity."

Let's enjoy that again:

Suzannah's father, Amardeep Singh

You can imagine what the comments on Deep's Facebook page looked like. Baljeet Singh: "Can you tell me more about my 12 year old niece? Will she be joining us for Thanksgiving?" Arun Venugopal: "Forget her parents, what about yours? Who is the real Amardeep Singh?" Deep: "Oh man, I'm never going to live this down, am I?"

On the one hand, yeah, I don't mean to oversell this. So the writer had a brainfart, or perhaps even more likely, some editor saw the mention of two Sikhs in the article — the girl's dad and Deep — and decided to specify that they were the same person, y'know, for clarity. Errors happen. But I don't ever want to hear some newspaper or wire service flack spouting off about how news sites like Talking Points Memo can't be trusted because they lack the crackerjack fact-checking apparatus of the traditional media. Because it's a bit like the captain of the Andrea Doria complaining about how airplanes crash all the time.

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