Today, folks fuss about the media and sometimes strain to separate the believable from the inconceivable and truth from fiction. This is no recent development.
In 1874, The American Medical Weekly featured a stunning first-hand Civil War battlefield account by a physician. In an article entitled, "Attention Gynaecologists! - Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon, C.S.A.," Dr. LeGrand G. Capers, a Confederate captain, wrote of an incredible event about a wounded soldier who was shot in a most unfortunate anatomical location. Said bullet, having traveled through just the right place in the soldier's groin, impregnated a young woman who was nearby.
The vivid details of Capers' May 12, 1863, account at the Battle of Raymond cited the doctor's eyewitness account. The Confederate soldier reportedly fell to the ground and, almost simultaneously, a scream was heard from a nearby home.
While attending the infantryman, a mother approach Capers, pleading for assistance for her daughter. Capers' journal recorded his aid to the young lass because a bullet "had penetrated the left abdominal parietes, about midway between the umbilicus and anterior spinal process of the ilium, and was lost in the abdominal cavity, leaving a ragged wound behind."
This story, still published in the 1981 Farmer's Almanac, reports the 17-year-old girl delivered a healthy boy that had a Minié ball lodged in his infant body. The story had Capers' connecting the dots and the bullet to the Confederate soldier, who met the family and his offspring in order to later marry the young mother.
This event was referenced as being true as late as 1959 in the New York State Journal of Medicine in the article "Two unusual cases of gunshot wounds of the uterus." Yet, various accounts have Capers' original submission to the medical journal in 1874 as a prank that attempted to shame the wild exaggerations and yarns spun by many as tales grew taller from the Civil War days.
Capers did not, however, suffer the fate of the 24-hour news cycle and Facebook fury with his hoax.
Dial the clock forward. Earlier this month, U.S. Olympian Ryan Lochte captured headlines, first as champion swimmer, then as a victim of crime, then as a liar and vandal and now, who knows? Lochte reported to media outlets that he and three other teammates had been held at gunpoint for money at a Rio de Janeiro gas station, but the host city's police offered quite a different version of events.
Suddenly, the Olympians were accused of vandalism and a manufactured story with passports seized, a couple of the Americans detained and a $10,000 settlement paid by one American lad to avoid charges. The pendulum finally has seemed to center, exposing the unreliable nature of both versions from the celebrating swimmers on their international road trip and the questionable integrity of those charged with law and order in Brazil.
What's the lesson? Sadly, consumers of information are happy to believe the worst of people and lean into the lure of sensationalism. Some also enjoy the ill-gained attention from reality-show drama. These realities create a conundrum. Who do you believe? What do you believe? Who's truthful and does it matter? Worst of all, some exploit such times of distrust and difficulty by effectively hiding behind lies.
The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, "I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
Some gain by lies; the rest must trust after verifying.
Robin Smith, a former chairwoman of the Tennessee Republican Party, is owner of Rivers Edge Alliance.