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Oops, I better clarify that the title of this post is satirical.

Because you can’t trust everything you read on the internet. You have to verify it, take some time to find sources to back up your conclusions. That’s why I list my sources underneath every one of my articles, so you the reader can do just that. I don’t mean to sound all preachy and everything but this latest story I ran across shows why it’s important to research what you read.

Matthew Avitabile is an upstate New York grad student who writes a blog called Jumping in Pools. Often times his posts are satirical. In fact, one of the more recent blog posts that Avitabile did was actually titled “Obama to Consult Magic 8 Ball for Afghanistan Strategy.”

There’s nothing wrong with Avitabile’s postings. In fact, some of them are quite humorous. A while back Avitabile posted a blog, labeled satirical, about a fictitious seminar paper that Barack Obama wrote while at Columbia.

From JIP:

“Obama was required to write a ’senior seminar’ paper in order to graduate from Columbia. The subject of this paper, which totaled 44 pages, was American government. Entitled Aristocracy Reborn, this paper chronicled the long struggle of the working class against, as Obama put it, ‘plutocratic thugs with one hand on the money and the other on the government.’

“In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: ‘I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh.’

“In part, the future President blames this on the current economic system: ‘There are many who will defend the ‘free market.’ But who will defend the single mother of four working three jobs. When a system is allowed to be free at the expense of its citizens, then it is tyranny.’

“However, the President also singled out the American Constitution: ‘… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.’

“It is yet unknown if more of this thesis will be released. It was also noted that the President received an A- for the paper, which later led to his graduation.”

Despite the satire label on the post, the blog posting began to gain credibility. So much so that Rush Limbaugh actually cited the posting’s claims a couple of days ago on his radio show.

“The Constitution is the most liberty-promoting and freedom-acknowledging document in the history of the world, and this little boy in college is writing about it with utter disdain, and he still shares those feelings,” Limbaugh said, adding, “So Joe Klein at Time magazine has known for a long time about Obama’s college thesis when he was at Columbia. Why didn’t this come out a year ago at this time? Why didn’t this come out before the election in November?”

Perhaps because it never happened? Within minutes a caller informed Rush that there wasn’t any credibility to the accusations. Sometimes men like Rush Limbaugh don’t like to let pesky things like truth or facts get in the way though.

“I’m also told that the blog containing the passage on Obama’s thesis is a satire blog…,” he said minutes later in the same show. “So I shout from the mountaintops, ‘It was satire!’ But we know [Obama] thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth. He’s mad at the courts for not going far enough on it. So we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway. That’s how it works in the media today.”

Rush wasn’t the only one trying to backtrack though.

“It’s important to note that none of this nonsense would be running wild around the internet if the campaign had just released Obama’s thesis in the first place,” said Meredith Jessup of TownHall.com.

Yeah about that. A Columbia University spokesman told PolitiFact that “an undergraduate thesis requirement for those in political science did not even exist at Columbia in 1983.” There was no thesis, not for Obama or for any other Columbia political science student in that era.

Amazingly enough, this isn’t even the first time that one of Jumping In Pool’s fictitious postings had gained credibility. Remember the claim that Obama wanted soldiers to stop taking an oath to the Constitution and instead pledge their loyalty to the president himself? That claim was started by Avitabile as well (and was also false).

I’d like to clarify again, there’s nothing wrong with what Avitabile is doing. One of the most entertaining bloggers on today.com makes his money by posting nothing but satirical news posts. Avitabile explained that he wanted to do the post in satire, but not so over-the-top that you knew it was false right away.

“If you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny,” said Avitabile. “I kind of get inspiration from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. You want people to be let in and then at the end, they realize it, and either find it funny on its own terms or find their reaction to be funny.”

The problem comes when people blindly trust what they read in an e-mail forward/blog post and don’t take the time to do even a minimal amount of research before believing something that they hear or read.

Sources:
http://jumpinginpools.blogspot.com/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/oct/26/blog-posting/obamas-columbia-thesis-all-fiction-dreamed-blogger/

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