Oct 30
Before You Forward…
A local blogger, Josh of Floss Regularly, says he was fooled by a dreaded email forward about a live deer that had been supposedly caught in the ocean off Charleston Harbor.
Upon doing a little research, he discovered that the email wasn’t entirely correct: the deer had actually been caught offshore from Virginia, not Charleston.
He says:
“Never trust a President’s PR photographers, and never, never trust an email that says ‘fwd’ on it.”
That’s good advice, because you never know where these emails really begin. Gotta love the internet.
I’ve found, working in the media, that when a viewer sends a forwarded email to a newsroom, almost always accompanied with an attitude of disgust or impatience demanding to know why we haven’t covered this “big” event, there’s almost always something about the email that isn’t quite right.
If you’ve never visited Snopes.com, you should. It’s the first place you should go when you receive a forwarded email that you actually start believing. Snopes basically is a database for such emails, and it fact-checks them all. Some are true, some are false, and some, like the deer story, are somewhere in between.
I take what is probably an unreasonable bit of enjoyment in politely referring the more rude emailers to the site when they send us something we’ve “missed” (with inappropriate amounts of condescending attitude) when it turns out that the little email they’ve become so convinced is true…isn’t.
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October 30th, 2007 at 10:56 am
I’ve depended on Snopes for years now. I very seldom do forwards for any reason, and if I do, I forward it to one or two specific persons, not as a mass-mailing. I have one thing against Snopes: They have a pesky popup that shows as soon as I click on the search box. I guess that’s not much of a price to pay for accurate information.