Becket Adams writes for National Review Online about a disturbing legacy media trend.
A CNN guest claimed recently that Thomas Jefferson raped a 14-year-old slave.
No one at the table challenged the contributor. The assertion was presented as an indisputable fact, and the panel moved on to other topics.
It was an enlightening moment, given that we live in the era of instantaneous information.
Though most academics and even the caretakers of Monticello agree that Jefferson fathered several children with a teenage slave named Sally Hemings, some scholars, though a minority, have published extensive studies raising reasonable doubts. Maybe the account is true. Maybe it’s not. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The point is: There is a difference between an incontestable fact and something we believe is probably true, especially when it comes to history. That this distinction appears to be lost on so many people who talk for a living is frustrating, to say the least.
More frustrating is that the incident on CNN is hardly the first of its kind. This sort of thing, in which a theory is presented as a cold, hard fact, is common. The habit of packaging theories or even myths as the truth isn’t new; we’re all susceptible to the distortions of reality that occur naturally over time. What’s frustrating right now is that there are fewer excuses for said distortions. We no longer depend on massive archives of physical records, having to sift through mountains of paperwork to find the truth. We no longer rely on oral history and traditions. We each keep a supercomputer in our pocket, all day, every day; it’s always ready to share the world’s accumulated knowledge with us. All it requires is a swipe of a finger or a few spoken commands. We’re in a golden age for the curious. You want to know more about a topic? It’s all right there, at your fingertips. You only need to ask.
It’s exasperating, then, that theories, myths, second-hand anecdotes, etc., should still be allowed to go unchallenged, evolve into “facts,” and eventually become the consensus view when the tools for double-checking abound.
