Don’t Believe Everything You Read

Back in grammar school, most of us were taught that you can’t always believe everything you read. This didn’t keep people I knew from believing that the “x-ray specs” would actually allow you to see through walls, or that the “giant Polaris submarine” was more than just a cardboard box with delusions of grandeur, or (in extreme cases) even that the “sea monkeys” were more than just brine shrimp – and wasting their allowance finding this out. These days things seem to have gotten even worse, with a disturbingly large percentage of the public apparently believing that if you see it online it HAS to be true (which might account for the continued success of the Nigerian email scammers). People fail to realize that user comments are sometimes made by trolls, that bloggers do not always fact-check their sweeping generalizations (see what I did there?), or even that Wikipedia isn’t a real encyclopedia. However, it’s hard to imagine anyone falling for Bernie Madoff’s latest claim: that he’s working on course content with the people from Harvard Business School…

An article that ran last week on the Fox Business website tells the story of how every major news outlet is trying to get an exclusive interview with Madoff, and how the disgraced financier is using the opportunity to try to rehabilitate his image. It’s obvious why Madoff would want to do this: quite apart from the obvious need to convince everyone (including himself) that he really wasn’t such a bad guy and didn’t do all of the things people are saying about him, Madoff’s surviving son is apparently in negotiations with “60 Minutes” to talk about how some of the biggest losers in the Madoff case were those closest to Bernie himself. A much more immediate question, at least from where I’m sitting, is why anyone would want to listen to this sort of self-serving nonsense, knowing what we know now about Madoff and his methods…

To his credit, the Fox reporter does fact-check some of Madoff’s claims, and finds that most of them don’t hold up; Harvard Business School categorically denies having anything to do with Madoff, and many of his other claims are either unsupported or misrepresented. Even more bizarre, in some ways, are the accusations of insider trading as related shenanigans that Madoff has leveled against people whom he has never met and who have no connection to stock market trades in the first place. These are bizarre both because there is no reason to believe that Madoff would have any way of gaining such information, and also because Madoff himself had very little to do with trading himself (a ponzi scheme generally doesn’t actually buy or sell anything). Even if the Secretary of the Treasury (current or former) had anything to do with insider trading (neither the office itself nor the last two people to hold that office are in any way connected to any stock market), it’s really difficult to imagine how Madoff could have found that out in his prior role, let alone from inside a Federal prison…

One has to wonder if Madoff is attempting his own version of what historians and political scientists call “The Big Lie” – telling a tale so outrageous that people will accept it on the grounds that no one would attempt to tell such a whopper for fear of being laughed at (and similar consequences), and therefore it must be true. In Madoff’s case, it’s hard to imagine what he could possibly lose in this process – he’s already serving a life sentence, and it’s unlikely that he will ever get parole (or that he’d survive for ten minutes outside of protective custody if he did). Certainly, it's possible that the man has just come unhinged; it's also possible that his astonishing talent for misrepresenting the facts with a straight face has made him careless. Whether or not he can leverage enough of his remaining reputation for brilliance and capability (before starting his infamous ponzi scheme, he apparently WAS very good at what he did) to accomplish anything else remains to be seen – but it would probably be easier if he’d stop making statements can be easily disproved. For myself, I will just remind everyone reading this blog (assuming that anyone does) that you can’t believe everything you read – especially online…