Stories We Want to Believe

I cannot say that I was initially suspicious of the story that accompanied this picture.  I was more interested.  I first saw a Facebook link to this story which is posted at countercurrentnews.com and wanted to know more about it.  It is both more and less than it seems.

I started following the story of the Chibok school girls at the same time as the rest of the world: a month after the kidnapping took place in mid-April.  I may have followed it more closely because I was a high school principal.  I may have followed it more closely because I was aghast at the way people with disparate interests managed to shoehorn the details into their own narratives.  I wrote in this space about the parallel callousness of Boko Haram, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and President Jonathan's political opponents, all of whom seemed much less concerned with the girls themselves than with the political points they could score over the story.

Throughout the months, including October when the Nigerian Army bizarrely announced that the girls would be released the next day, I have been looking at accounts in the Nigerian press.  The parents of the girls have not moved on, the women who protest daily in Lagos have not moved on, and so -- unlike the rest of the world media -- the Nigerian press has not moved on.  Boko Haram has continued with horrifying attacks on education, including suicide bombings of a teacher's college in Kontagora and a school assembly in Potiskum.

That's why any sign of successful resistance caught my attention, especially one with a photo like this, with its overtones of female empowerment, reversing the lack of power implied by the kidnapping of several hundred teenaged girls.  So, as I say, I read the story closely for more details, not because I didn't want to believe it.

My first problem was that I couldn't get more information.  The story opens with the phrase "Several Nigerian media outlets have been reporting."  But there was no hyperlink and no citation.  I wanted to see what they have been reporting, but I couldn't.  It was only later that I noticed the weird claims, beginning in the third sentence, about "talismans" that had successfully disarmed the Boko Haram gang members.

I Googled the story, but found the usual verbatim repetitions on other websites.  I was initially completely unable to find any reference to it in the Nigerian press, which was strange considering that these US and British websites supposedly got it from "reports" on "Nigerian media outlets."

Then it occurred to me to do a reverse image search on the picture.  I cannot claim to have been fully conscious that the photo was driving the story.  It was more of an intuitive move.  But things immediately got stranger.  First, I found the late December stories I had already seen, reporting the women's successful armed resistance to Boko Haram as "recent."  Then, I started finding references to this same resistance -- with the same photo -- back in mid-May, at the time of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign on Twitter.  Those stories tended to have much more on magic spells and amulets.  Some had other agendas.  I read one story which claimed that Michelle Obama had initiated (instead of participated in) the hashtag campaign.  That writer argued that the Obamas want to take away our guns and replace them with hashtags.  He implied that leaving us at the mercy of Boko Haram and the US government is much the same.

I finally found the blog of Farooq Kperogi, an assistant professor of journalism in Atlanta who wrote at length about the scandalously bad reporting on the Chibok girls, especially in the Nigerian tabloids.  You can find that article here.  Professor Kperogi identifies the source of the photo as a Times of London article on militias in Mali resisting Tuareg rebels. Yes, that is 1600 road miles (and a 36-hour drive) away.  Yes, there is an entire third country between Nigeria and Mali.  So I sympathize with Professor Kperogi about the sorry state of tabloid journalism in Nigeria.  But I also have to wonder about "news" websites like Counter Current with prominently posted disclaimers that they are "not responsible for inaccuracies" and that neither owners, management, editors or writers are responsible for errors.

But  I am not that interested in fake news or its purveyors.  I am much more interested in our propensity for accepting it, especially when it fits with what we want to believe.  It is all too easy for me to shake my head in dismay at the credulous ways of people who disagree with me, and at how they accept patently ridiculous stories as gospel.  Every one of you can point to multiple examples.  But how are we to discover our own credulity?  That may be the first step to helping other people overcome theirs.