Speaking of the truth, or in this case, what may be half-truth. The local mayoral election, earlier this month, came down to a difference of a thousand votes in hundreds of thousands cast. Hence, it is a reasonable conjecture that some small changes may have thrown the election one way or another.
One of those small changes was an allegation, on a web site, that the wife of one of the candidates somehow cheated someone out of some money. This incident occurred before she became the wife of said candidate. The allegations came from a civil case filed in a local court.
Or, at least, the allegations came from selected quotes from just one side of the civil case. As anyone who knows anything about court cases, if you listen to just one side you would think this was a compelling, slam dunk of a case. You would, of course, be wrong because if you hear the other side things aren't that simple.
So, about three weeks before election day, this woman writes a "story", based on one side of the case and tries to pass this off as professional journalism (with all the ethics rules and editorial oversight that it implies).
But the writer is not a professional journalist. At least, not since she was fired for unprofessional behavior while employed at a local business weekly newspaper. Indeed, she wrote so many slanted, unprofessional, and obviously unfactual articles against Democrats that the editor, who is a Republican, was forced to fire her. In addition, she failed to disclose that she is the girlfriend of a Republican state senator. A senator that supported the opponent of this candidate by being in a full-page ad in the daily paper. But most importantly, she failed to report the other side of the story contained in the very documents she used to write her story.
In her defense now comes a local conservative Republican radio personality trumpeting how if you want the truth, you should go to her site because "Big Media" won't write any stories about it. Well, actually other media have written stories. But for those that haven't, what they've said is that there isn't a story. That the charges have not been substantiated. Further, and this is the critical part, there is substantial doubt that the allegations are true, based on the evidence in the very case the female writer quotes from.
There has been a lot of crowing, within the blogshpere, about how blogs are the "new journalism" and that the old media don't get the stories that are important. While this may be true, sometimes, people need to remember that just because something is published on a website doesn't mean it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
People need to remember that there are people out there that will try to weave a web of half-truths that sound plausible in order to fool you and to get you to vote one way or the other. All I can say is that you need to think critically, know the source of the information, use your common sense, and then determine what is the truth.
Aloha!
