Critical Thinking

Are critical thinking skills still being taught?

Has the 24 hour a day news cycle reduced journalism to being a race to being the first with a story, without concern that the facts may be incorrect?

I read a story on-line recently, but can't locate it for a link, about a 22 year old who added a non-existent quote to a wikipedia page about a recently deceased musician. He wanted to see how quickly false information would travel on the web, and get into mainstream reporting.

A number of newspapers pulled the quote from wikipedia and ran it in their obit articles. Wikipedia pulled the quote from its article because the quote had no citation. (Similar to this blog entry).

An interesting development would have been if the quote creator had used the newspaper's use of his wikipedia quote as the citation to put the quote back on the wikipedia page. And the circle would have been unbroken. But he choose not to complete the deception. He left the quote off the page once it was pulled by wikipedia.

The 22 year old fessed up to his experiment about month after it had taken place. He was waiting to see if any of the newspapers would discover their error. They did not.

The whole point of this entry is to point out that just because something is on the web, in the newspaper or on TV doesn't mean that it is a fact. Fact checkers no longer exist, and I am not sure they ever did exist except in the realm of our expectations.

What is a person to do?

Be a little skeptical. Does what you are reading seem reasonable based on what you already know? Are there other possibilities to what has been reported?

Did I just make all this up? You will have to make a judgement.

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