I recently saw a vaguely official-looking story circulating on Facebook about NASA confirming there will be six days of darkness in December, due to a solar storm. Before I broke out the sun lamps and my emergency collection of tinned beans, I Googled the story and immediately found it was a hoax.
Yet, the story threw enough credible references and fancy words in to hoodwink the casual reader, and was shared as a “real” story by hundreds. It never fails to make me smile, the stories that people fall for hook, line and sinker, even when it’s as outlandish as a report of U.S. President Barack Obama supposedly calling Prime Minister Stephen Harper a “lump… all pudge and hair.”
Never was there an age where it is as important to be critical of what you see and hear and to question the validity of your source than now. Sure, people have always loved gossip and innuendo, but in the time of social media, lies and misinformation now reach audiences of suckered billions in minutes.
This brings me to the biggest story of last week, spread like wildfire and completely impossible to avoid, that of Jian Ghomeshi being let go from the CBC.
Ghomeshi has been at the helm of the popular radio show Q for years, and is one of the biggest celebrity figures of the CBC radio brand, so it was little surprise that the public broadcaster’s firing of the star created such a furor. Throwing fuel onto the fire was Ghomeshi’s public strike against CBC with a long post on Facebook, claiming he was fired over his private sex life that should have nothing to do with his employment. He claimed he only engaged in consensual activities, going on to vilify the women (at last count there were nine of them) who have alleged that he subjected them to non-consensual violence.
More than 100,000 people “liked” his original post, with hundreds writing to express their support, taking him at his word and denouncing these anonymous women for dragging his name through the mud in the court of opinion, rather than the criminal courts. As the Toronto Star and CBC began running statements from these women, who alleged they were choked, slapped, punched and otherwise violated by Ghomeshi, many of his initial supporters stopped and backtracked.
One of the hardest challenges for all of us is remembering the presumption of innocence in the legal system until a person pleads – or is found - guilty. A story of an alleged assault, harassment, drug charges or anything else immediately and irrevocably can taint a person’s whole life and image, even before the case goes to court.
In Ghomeshi’s case, we saw the other side of the coin – that the public can be quick to protect their heroes and shame and dismiss their detractors without due consideration. It shouldn’t be a big surprise then, that these women were hesitant to come forward with their allegations against him to avoid just that fate.
All of us need to learn that there is an entire ocean between what we know and what we think we know. As Socrates said, wisest is the person who knows that he/she knows nothing. It’s a constant amazement to me that as close as I am to my husband and children and how much I love them, that I can’t see through their very eyes and feel through their hearts or truly know what it’s like to be them.
If that’s the case for those nearest and dearest to us, how much less do we know about our friends, neighbours and in the case of Ghomeshi, our public figures? Reading something on Reddit does not make us an expert on the subject. It’s important, now more than ever, to teach our kids too about being critical thinkers, researching and questioning, and being open to multiple possibilities and viewpoints. Maybe then we’ll be less likely to see stories circulate of six days of darkness, Obama calling Harper a “shifty” lump, or potential abusers being defended as victims of smear campaigns.
