Six tips from Snopes.com on e-mails

The founder of a Web site on urban legends talks about truth-squadding political rumors.

By Ryan Beckwith

For an apolitical guy, David Mikkelson spends a lot of time chasing political rumors.

Since 1994, the former computer programmer has run the popular www.Snopes.com Web site, which is devoted to verifying — or more often, debunking — urban legends passed around the Internet.

Named for a notorious family in a series of novels by William Faulkner, the site started by focusing on Disney-related rumors, but Mikkelson now spends around 85 percent of his time on political issues.

Recently, the 49-year-old California resident contacted Congress.org while trying to track down Harold B. Estes, author of an e-mail purportedly from a World War II veteran . The letter , now making the rounds on the Internet, chastises President Obama.

"I realize you never served in the military and never had to defend your country with your life but you're the Commander-in-Chief now, son," the letter states. "Do your job."

The letter was a classic of its genre: The angry open letter from a regular Joe to the president. Mikkelson has also run across letters from police officers, veterans, schoolteachers and doctors.

More often, the e-mail forwards are credited to someone famous, such as comedians Jay Leno, Bill Cosby or George Carlin, TV commentator Andy Rooney or national newspaper columnists.

That's where Mikkelson's work begins. Readers forward these e-mails to him, he posts them on www.Snopes.com and he and readers then research them together to determine if they are accurate.

Many are misattributed or contain errors. Mikkelson has a few theories how that happens:

E-MAIL SIGNATURES: Some e-mails are misattributed to ordinary people who forwarded them because their e-mail signature is at the bottom. Farther down the chain, someone else mistakes that for the signature of the author and rewrites the top to reflect that mistaken assumption.

E-MAIL SIGN-OFFS: Some e-mailers have a quote from a famous person as part of their sign-off on every e-mail. That quote is then mistaken for the ending line of the original piece and its author is credited for the entire e-mail.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY: Readers who are retelling or rewriting something they heard often misattribute it to the most famous example. "Any urban legend about fast food always ends up being about McDonald's no matter how it started out," Mikkelson said.

PUTTING IT IN THEIR OWN WORDS: Some readers retell things they heard second-hand as though they saw them. This famously happened with an Army captain in Afghanistan who wrote a much-forwarded e-mail about Obama during the 2008 election.

APPEALS TO AUTHORITY: People believe a letter will have more authority if it was written by an expert, an insider or even just someone famous. One recent letter even attributed an e-mail to the widow of comedian Buddy Hackett . "They were clearly grasping at straws," Mikkelson said.

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES: Some e-mails are never resolved. "Sometimes there's just a dead end and you never really figure out who the originator was," he said. He said he "can't discount the idea" that they are maliciously invented, but he doesn't have any evidence that's happened either.

Mikkelson said he finds the letters attributed to everyday people the most puzzling. Often, the letters are mostly general opinion and it would not matter who wrote them.

"I don't know why it's important to know whether or not some lady in Orlando, Fla., wrote something in a letter to the editor or not," he said. "What's the difference if it's some guy who's an accountant in Portland, Ore.?"

In the case of the letter from the World War II veteran, there was a little misdirection.

Someone who received the e-mail used Congress.org to send it to the president and two senators from Florida. That led some on the Internet to attribute the letter to a Florida resident, which was incorrect.

As it turned out, however, the letter was legitimate. Though he couldn't reach the author, the publisher of a Navy magazine that once featured the veteran confirmed he had dictated the letter to a secretary and signed it personally.

Ryan Teague Beckwith is the deputy editor of Congress.org.

http://www.congress.org/news/2009/11/30 ... _on_emails