Rumour, the swiftest of all evils

Francis Wheen in the January 2010 Literary Review, has a piece, A Wink and A Nudge, of which it would be nice to see more. The book being reviewed is Cass Sunstein's On Rumors. I enjoy the review in part because it is not mealy mouthed as so many reviews are. Wheen slices and dices with a fair amount of relish.

The other reason it is an enjoyable review in its own right (possiby more enjoyable than the book being reviewed) is that Wheen holds the author to at least some minimal level of intellectual rigor and doesn't let him get by with blithe throw-away assertions. The juxtaposition of Sunstein's assertions with Wheen's ripostes demonstrate very clearly which is the more informed thinker.

It's as if rumours never existed before the Internet. In the era of bloggers and Google, according to Sunstein, 'audiences can be manipulated in order to believe things that, whether or not literally false, are not exactly true'. He is unimpressed by the argument that blogs and Google also make it easier than ever to correct false rumours. 'Often the truth fails to catch up with a lie.' Nothing new there: the complaint that a lie can be halfway round the world before the truth pulls its boots on has been heard for centuries. You'll find it in Virgil (Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum - 'Rumour, the swiftest of all evils') and in the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part II: 'Open your ears; for which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? / I, from the orient to the drooping west, / Making the wind my post-horse ...' Sunstein cites neither of these, presumably because they would sabotage his ahistorical implication that the bush telegraph is a by-product of YouTube and Facebook.