Internet lies: Curl up and dye

Just when women felt comfortable going blonde, there came word that blondeness is facing extinction.

Naturally occurring blondeness, that is.

Then came the strangest news of all: The reports were not just exaggerated but also completely fabricated. According to the report, natural blondes would become extinct within the next 200 years because their hair color derives from a recessive gene; the last blondes to survive, the “study” supposedly concluded, would be Finns.

Aha! We’d been had again, courtesy of the Internet and our increasing gullibility to cyberspace information.

This time, the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) was forced to interrupt its globe-spanning fights against HIV/AIDS, suicide, meningitis and tuberculosis to state: “WHO wishes to clarify that it has never conducted research on this subject. … WHO has no knowledge of how these news reports originated but would like to stress that we have no opinion on the future existence of blondes.”

The story that had spread across the networks and cable was easily debunked – and could have been nipped in the bud if reporters had done what we used to do automatically: check the facts.

Not just members of the press, mind you, find themselves stung by a rash reliance on Internet information. That, plus his own possible animus toward the Israeli government, is what accounts for poet laureate Amiri Baraka’s troubles in New Jersey.

He faces the loss of his position because of a poem he wrote based on information he got from the Israeli press and the Internet after Sept. 11.

Provocative is one thing; irresponsible is another – even if one allows for poetic license.

Baraka counters efforts to oust him by saying that critics want to “suppress and stigmatize independent thinkers everywhere.”

Well, even “independent thinkers” ought to check their facts. He does have free-speech rights, and those who appointed the never-shy Baraka should have known what they were in for.

The real lesson here, though, is that when you’re tempted to pass along something that’s come your way from the Internet, do what I did when a friend of mine at the United Nations sent me the WHO statement on blondes.

I asked, “Is this for real?” – and then started doing some checking.

E.R. Shipp is a columnist for the New York Daily News. She won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1996.