“… people are rather cavalier about the facts”

If I learned anything in my years at an intellectual-property litigation firm, it was that, even when people tell you things with the best of intentions, you can’t always take what they say at face value. (The “Distortions” category of posts at The Questioning Christian, a personal blog that I maintain off and on, collects a bunch of everyday examples.)

This past Sunday the NY Times profiled the famous Snopes.com Web site, which specializes in checking out urban legends and the like; its founders, a married couple, now make a living from the site’s ad­ver­tis­ing revenues. Excerpt:

The popularity of Snopes — it attracts seven million to eight million unique visitors in an average month — puts the couple in a unique position to evaluate digital society’s attitudes toward accuracy.

After 14 years, they seem to have concluded that people are rather cavalier about the facts.

* * *

“People keep falling for the same kind of things over and over again,” Mr. Mikkelson said. Some readers always seem to think, for instance, that the government is trying to poison them: Mrs. Mikkelson said rumors about AIDS have been recycled into rumors about swine flu vaccines.

For the Mikkelsons, the site affirms what cultural critics have bemoaned for years: the rejection of nuance and facts that run contrary to one’s point of view.

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false,” Mr. Mikkelson said. “In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

(Emphasis added.)