What's not on the Internet

Of course you know you shouldn't trust what you read in the wilder realms of the Internet. But what when mainstream journalists fall for a not-even-very-elaborate hoax and pass the information on to you as if it were kosher?

Take the example, last week, of the fun and games created by some German filmmakers, who ran a fake story about a suicide bombing in a non-existent California town called Bluewater.

We simply have to get used to the idea that idle men around the world (and it is always men, I'm afraid) will do this kind of thing just because they can. It's a bit like computer viruses: no one makes any money from causing this havoc, it just gives a sense of power. Be warned and beware.

Meanwhile, shoddy standards of research and journalism abound. I visited a venerable shipping industry publication last week, where one of the reporters confessed the he had hit a brick wall with the curious, and lamentably obvious lie that the Russian ship Arctic Sea was hijacked in the English Channel earlier this year. Anyone who has covered the shipping industry for years, as I did, would know that the chances of getting hijacked in the English Channel are about as high as a masked highwayman waylaying you on the Route 66, brandishing a duelling pistol and demanding dubloons. The reporter agreed that clearly this was a fiction, and that something deeply fishy was afoot, but that he had been able to turn up nothing concrete and so had agreed with his editor that they'd just drop the story altogether. I sympathise with the journalist in question - he's doing the work of three, no doubt. But, really. What a shame.

At least the said journalist was actually, like, making telephone calls and pulling in sources. Many journalists and other researchers who ought to know a great deal better increasingly regard the Internet as the sole source for information. The error of this was brought home to me this past weekend when I attended the biannual conference held by the International Rebecca West Society, which invites academics to celebrate and investigate the works of my great-aunt, who was a fiery feminist writer once described by critic Ken Tynan as the "finest journalist alive" (she's dead now, I'm sad to say). These academic conferences tend to be a bit deathly to us mere mortals, to be honest, but one of the presentations was an absolute sensation. A historian researching a distant relative of mine had stumbled across a reference to my great-grandfather, Rebecca West's father, which lead him on a paper trail all across England that revealed my great grand-papa was a convicted thief and jailbird. Indeed, when he was supposed to have been acting as a stretcher-bearer in the American Civil War (a favorite family story), he was instead up before the Crown magistrate for stealing valuable coins from his Army club. It was an amazing story, including a bizarre episode in which, prevented from gaining further access to the coin collection, he instead stole some letters by Coleridge, but them left them in a taxi. Gosh, I don't come from such fine stock as I thought. My family are all teasing each other about it with great glee, patting each other down for stolen coins. But my point is a serious one: none of the information that lead to these shocking revelations were available on the Internet. There were two of Rebecca West's biographers present at the conference, and you can imagine how embarassed they were to realize that they had neglected to find out that the subject of their weighty and otherwise worthy tomes was a convicted criminal. Whoops.

Be warned. Keep your standards high. Question vigorously. Trust no one. Not even me.