The New York Times reports about the Davidson College graduate who bought the expired ChristianTimesNewspaperDotCom domain (which we won’t link to here) and posted this story:
“BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.”
It wasn’t true. He made it up, including stealing a photo published by a real newspaper. He made thousands of dollars via Google ads placed on the site.
The results:
* Nearly 6 million people saw the lie.
* The lie was pushed around the Internet by people linking to it and remarking on it, eager to believe the lie.
* An Ohio country elections board announced an investigation.
* Ohio’s secretary of state had to issue a statement denying the lie.
* Google figured out what was going on and won’t let the site use its ad service anymore.
And the 25-year-old former political science and economics student, at least in The Times’ story, didn’t seem to fully understand the problem:
Asked whether he felt any guilt at having spread lies about a presidential candidate, Mr. Harris grew thoughtful. But he took refuge in the notion that politics is by its nature replete with exaggerations, half-truths and outright whoppers, so he was hardly adding much to the sum total.
“Hardly anything a campaign or a candidate says is completely true,” he said.
The fact that politicians don’t communicate “completely true” things doesn’t mean it’s ethically OK, of course.
In a world where we talk about ethics as a “rainbow of gray,” this is a no-brainer. If no one has ever told you, then you read it here first: “It’s wrong to make up stuff that people might believe. And it’s particularly wrong to do it under the aegis of religion.”
Lying, especially under a Christian name, reminds me of a 1980s Eddie Murphy routine about the guy who shot Pope John Paul II in May 1981:
“I guess the guy figured, ‘Hey look, I want to go to Hell and I don’t wanna stand in no line with everybody. .. . I wanna take the Hell Express. . .You walk up to the door with your ticket, they say, ‘Shot the Pope? You can go right through, man.’”