So, I was just lolling about facebook, and happened upon a link Adam Mclean shared. This is it. This is an article by the site NewsVoice. The article talks about a bill that was just passed by the Senate that the reporter claims effectively negates the bill of rights, and establishes an authoritarian rule. They give a link to the actual bill, but never reference passages. The article also references a WIRED article, quoting from the article, but again not the bill.
I hadn’t thought about any of this while I was reading the article, however. My first reaction to this story was outrage and fear. “What?” I thought, “Secret assassinations? Military dictatorships? Is this true?” So I started to read the comments section, and suddenly the lack of source material was made clear. The comments argue back and forth about the legitimacy of this threat. But more than that, they emphasize that this article is very poorly researched. Neither this article nor the WIRED article quote from the actual bill.
Lacking actual evidence to support any of these claims, I clicked on the link to the bill. Suddenly 926 pages of PDF popped up on my screen. 926. The table of contents are themselves disturbingly long. I tried for about 5 minutes to find anything significant that I could understand. I gave up when my eyes crossed. This bill is unreadable unless you have hours to devote.
So, now I don’t know the actual threat of this bill being passed, and the articles and comments I read about it vary widely in assesment. Most significantly I did not read a single quotation from the bill! Has anyone read this thing?
The reason I’m writing about it, is to emphasize the importance of where we get our information. Can we trust anything without reading the source material? Theoretically no. However, sometimes the source material is far too dense or complicated for an average citizen to read. This is also important to remember as dramaturgs. When we tell our artistic team an analysis of any fact, we must provide them with the source. It’s amazing that several online publications did not do this simple journalistic requirement. And if anyone wants to help me translate and assess this bill, feel free!
