The Hoax that Won't Go Away – Chapter Two

Lee Ellis

There is a hoax that has been going around now for 30 years! I wrote about this last year, but here it is in 2005 with only another four months before Christmas, and this hoax is still arriving in mail boxes. I have received over five versions of this in just the past 10 days, all from well-meaning friends. We do not need a calendar to know that it is either close to Easter or close to Christmas, because this hoax comes up twice every year as these two holidays approach. Innocent and naïve people, some with forgetful memories like mine, believe it and forward it constantly each time.

What is this hoax? It is the lie that a petition called RM 2493 is currently before the FCC and that it will stop all programs mentioning God from being broadcast! According to the current e-mail scare, you must write the FCC immediately.

I was first burned by this when I published a newsletter for my church about 23 years ago. This was before access to the Internet or e-mail. At that time, the hoax was distributed by hand-written letters passed along to church-going people at various social organizations. I recall being amazed when I received one of these letters and I rushed to print it in the church newsletter. Well, needless to say, within a month, I had received letters or phone calls from other churches telling me that this was a fake and that I should print a retraction. Of course I did, much to my chagrin.

It was then that I discovered that the Chicago Tribune, the NY Times and other main line newspapers, five years before that, had printed front page news stories about this hoax in an attempt to stop it. Nothing, it seemed, then, could do this.

Worse, I also discovered that this fraudulent story was costing our government (You, the taxpayer) hundreds of thousands of dollars to process all the letters from naive, honest people who were writing the FCC, convinced that this must be a true story.

SNOPES, the hoax site, states, “Between 1975 and 1995, more than 30 million pieces of mail decrying RM-2493 had been received by the FCC.” Further, the hoax report goes on, "The intent of the infamous RM-2493 was to ensure channels reserved for educational purposes ended up being used for education and not be taken up by religious groups looking to use them for a different purpose … The real petition the FCC was asked to consider was filed in December 1974 and defeated in August 1975.…The FCC saw its role in such matters quite clearly: As a government agency, the Commission is enjoined by the First Amendment to observe a stance of neutrality."

The search engine GOOGLE has over sixty pages with stories about this same petition in all languages. It literally has traveled around the world.

It may have started off as a misunderstanding, but I have seen this message updated to fit the times over the years. The name of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the famous atheist who was murdered in 1995, was first added to the message and then a few months after her death, the name of the popular TV program, "Touched by an Angel" was included. When this TV show's popularity waned, the James Dobson name was added. The CBS name has also been added to this hoax from time to time, too, urging people to write to this network as well as to the FCC.

Who is updating this phony message and why? Some have suggested that terrorists are experimenting with ways of getting innocent e-mailers to slow or stop the ability to communicate quickly. Obviously some people want this hoax to continue circulating. Why, is anyone’s guess. They certainly have been successful! I suspect that we will see another onslaught of these same e-mails as we approach the end of the year.

This month, I have been deluged by e-mails containing this hoax, many of them asking for signatures. One just received will give you an idea of how many people are fooled or deceived by this hoax daily. There are over 800 names that have been placed at the bottom of just ONE of these e-mails! These are people who have signed and forwarded this along to thousands of other people.

The mathematical progression of such forwarding is almost impossible to fathom. If ten people forward a hoax to ten friends, and they, in turn, follow this example, it takes only a few hours for the Internet to be clogged with hundreds of thousands of phony messages stretching across the world asking for help.

There are so many disinformation messages forwarded by e-mailers, that it is suggested that you NEVER forward any e-mail warnings until you have personally checked one of the many hoax sites first. It is so very easy to go to www.snopes.com, or to www.truthorfiction.com, look for SEARCH and simply type the key words into it and press ENTER on your computer. You will be immediately told what is false and what is the truth. Another source is, of course, GOOGLE.

A few minutes doing this will save you and thousands of other friends or associates much time and much embarrassment. Further, you will be saving the Internet from being overcrowded with worthless information. As a result, your good and personal e-mail will reach you faster and more accurately.

Thank you for helping to stem the flow of disinformation and hoaxes. They only hurt people --- and isn’t there enough of that in the world today?

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Lee Ellis is a retired journalist and narrator, formerly with both CBS and Gannett (USA Weekend). He was also a combat veteran of WWII, having fought in the South Pacific invasions. He had the pleasure of interviewing Ronald Reagan as an actor and then later working to help him become Governor of California. At the age of 80, he is keeping busy writing and doing free lance narrations for radio and television. He is an active member of Rotary and the VFW.

indiolee@dc.rr.com