In what some would call an act of war toward the United States, Internet sources alleged in reports last week that members of Mexico’s Los Zetas drug cartel "took over" two ranches near Laredo. Except they didn't.
If cartel members really had invaded, you could call it a hostile act or maybe an act of war. But it didn't actually happen.
Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar, Laredo Police Chief Carlos Maldonado, the FBI and U.S. Customs and Border Protection all confirm that the Los Zetas invasion never occurred.
But not being inclined to let the facts get in the way of a sensational story, several groups, including the Houston Examiner and the Texas Nationalist Movement, circulated the story on last Friday afternoon and into Saturday through blogs, Internet postings and e-mails.
By Saturday, the story had been debunked and the fervor over the alleged “invasion” had begun to die down.
While many news outlets (including KENS 5, which did not report the invasion) ran stories Saturday night informing people that the invasion was at best a collection of misinformation and at worst a hoax, other organizations, including Diggers Realm (the source of the story), stood by the erroneous reports.
The very fact that a story like this can spread so quickly without any verification is alarming.
Too often in this business of being first with a story, the basic tenets of journalism are discarded as nothing more than archaic cumbersome baggage.
The race to “get it out there” now and fact-check it later is precarious and leads to the dangerous dissemination of misinformation as witnessed in last week’s story.
What was truly scary about this report is that so many news organizations ran with the story without fact checking it or taking even a cursory look at the “sources.”
Diggers Realm, the source of the story, is an anti-immigration website.
The Texas Nationalist Movement, the source of chain e-mail reporting the invasion, is a political group in the state advocating the secession of Texas from the United States.
There is no way to stop the evolution and transformation in the way news is distributed these days. The Internet provides a nonstop feed of information. Stories can be born and die again before their validity is ever checked.
Not a day goes by that I don’t receive at least one e-mail from someone on either the left or right talking about a story they are “outraged” that we are not reporting.
Stories like the Los Zetas invasion, the missing Obama birth certificate, the U.S. government’s role in the Sept. 11 attacks and others make their way across the Internet periodically, landing in people's “inboxes” with a seemingly legitimate article backing up the claims.
Guarding against a false story spreading like wildfire can only be accomplished through due diligence. Those of us in the media must continue to ask questions and verify the answers.
Beyond that, we must trust in the wisdom of our 16th president:
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” – Abraham Lincoln
