Don't buy suspicious banana warnings or Budget news on the Web or anywhere

Web teaches media literacy because it makes readers skeptical of all information sources - at least it ought to...

By: Ish Theilheimer

  As well as being a great way to exchange information, the Internet is a playground for fanatics, true believers, and pranksters. I guess that's why I feel right at home in the cyberworld.
  You never know whether anything you see on the Internet is for real. So everyone is, or should be, cautious. You need to look for verification.
  Last week we received one of those e-mails that sounded sincere and alarming, but it made our antennae twitch. It warned of toxic bananas being allowed into the US that Canadians should not eat.
  We wrote back to the source and asked for confirmation. A few hours later, another correspondent set us straight on what turned out indeed to be a hoax. He referred us to a website from the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta:

www.cdc.gov/ncidod/banana.htm

  At least it says it's from the Center for Disease Control. And it says the toxic banana scare was unfounded.
  Straight Goods believes the Web is good because people know to be cynical about it, unlike major media which purports to be objective. The Web forces people to exercise their own judgement.
  One of the most common questions people ask me about Web publishing is how to tell if the stuff we get is true. I tell them we do what any other publisher does. We go by how well we know the writer and, if we don't know them well, we ask for proof of unlikely claims.
  We expect readers do the same thing. We don't expect you to trust Straight Goods on faith either. Compare with leading brands. See how our version of reality stacks up.
  We hope readers will apply the same standards to all news media, broadcast, print, or on-line. We can only hope they'll raise an eyebrow or spit or something when they see the Globe and Mail headline "Taxpayers get reward at last" after the Budget.
  We can hope that when listeners hear CBC Radio report Canadians pay more tax than Americans, that they'll say "Yeah - says who? Straight Goods says average Canadians have more take-home pay than Americans. And that's straight from the OECD"
  People who make $60,000 are middle-class. They are ordinary people. But they do not constitute the middle, no matter how big the headlines are suggesting they are. The real payoff from this budget is for people making over $80,000. We're talking about approximately 600,000 Canadians, just three percent of all of us. A special interest group.
  We can hope that many Canadians took the time to look at the numbers. Average two-job families ($60,000/year) get a federal tax break of $333. The top three percent (family income: $150,000) get a break of $1,177 - three and a half times more, plus all the other new breaks that only affect the highest earners for things like foreign content rules. Some middle-class tax break.
  The day after the Budget, I stopped at a gas station in the middle of Ontario cottage country. The owner came out to pump gas. When I paid him, I gestured at the pile of newspapers claiming victory for the taxpayer.
  "What do you think of the Budget," I asked.
  "Not gonna make much difference to me," he said. "Couple hundred bucks or so. But what about health care?" He went on to bend my ear about diabetic and asthma medications many people depend on and how expensive they are.
  "Why aren't they paid for under medicare?" he wanted to know. and "Why didn't the Budget do anything about that?"
  Good question. We need to be skeptical when media of any kind tell unlikely stories about budgets and bananas.

- Ish Theilheimer
- March 6, 2000

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