It’s Easy To Get Tangled In Web

Technology can flash words around the world but it can’t make the words true.

That’s a timely lesson, for a culture infatuated with the Internet.

It’s a lesson learned the hard way by one who might have known better: retired ABC newsman Pierre Salinger.

Salinger caused a sensation when he announced that someone in “French security” had shown him a document saying the U.S. Navy was responsible for the July 17 explosion that sent TWA Flight 800 into the Atlantic.

Hours later, newsmen confronted Salinger with what he admitted was the same document - obtained from the Internet. The document is a scrap of e-mailed fiction, a discredited conspiracy theory that circulates on the World Wide Web.

Salinger was fooled. So were others. It won’t be the last time.

When and if investigators do determine the truth about TWA Flight 800, their findings will be available on the Internet, and of course on other media as well. Will people recognize the truth when it appears? That’s up to them. It’s also up to those who’ll tell the story.

The Internet is hardly the first medium to face credibility problems. It has taken years for people to realize that television can mislead as effectively as it can inform. When is TV fooling us, and when is it showing the truth? The answer depends on the integrity of the humans who run and use the medium’s machines.

Same goes for the World Wide Web. This astounding medium can connect you to scientists in Antarctica, clinicians at the University of Washington medical school, full-text copies of bills pending in Congress. It also can connect you to crooks, frauds, manipulators and psychopaths.

This week, the New York Times reported that the Internet could replace stockbrokers, connecting investors more directly with sellers of stock and sources of information. However, the Internet cannot fill the broker’s most important role: sorting information that’s valuable and trustworthy from the avalanche of information that’s not.

The Internet, like television, can offer sources of information and opportunities for commerce that are worthy of trust. But the technology itself is only a tool. Do the words turn somersaults across your computer screen, flash in every color of the rainbow or arrive in the electronic equivalent of a plain brown wrapper? It doesn’t matter.

Credibility depends on the source, not the packaging. Oldfashioned, human discernment is an operating system that never goes out of date. Consumers need it as much as professional communicators do - now, more than ever.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board