In December, Edgar
Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old North Carolina man, reacting to a story he had read online, drove to Comet Ping Pong, a Washington,
D.C. pizzeria with a machine gun to confront an alleged child-sex ring
supposedly involving Hillary Clinton.
When he got there he got a
big surprise — the story that inspired him to take action turned out to be false, with no ring in sight.
Last night the CBS
newsmagazine “60 Minutes” aired a segment about “fake news,” during which
unverifiable facts are spouted as news designed to smear someone. It’s not
news, as this kind of thing has been going on for some time, but it shows me
that folks simply aren’t using discernment.
I first began to notice
this in 1992, when conservative media began attacking Bill Clinton when he was
running for president; I eventually learned about the conspiracy in the fall of
1995, which was actually reported in legitimate media. Things have gotten worse
since, with the focus on online media that report “what the mainstream media
won’t.”
Which is true — for a good
reason: Real news outlets check, double-check and triple-check their sources.
These fake sources don’t even bother.
Last week I confronted someone online whom I
know to be a Christian about his posting a video on “Pizzagate” and told him to
take it down because I knew it was false. He refused, insisted that it was true
and tried to blame me for being “partisan.” (That was beside the point.) When
we Christians engage in gossip for the purpose of hating someone for political
reasons we compromise our witness.
Solution? We need to come
out of our bubbles and not always listen to people who tell us what we want to
hear. These days that’s a tough sell — but needs to be done.
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