The 30 Year Hoax Returns for 2006

Lee Ellis

OOPS! The calendar page was just turned to December 2006 and it has started again! Nothing can kill it! It invades our e-mails every year at Easter and Christmas. We, who have forgetful memories, or are naive, or are among the innocents who believe what we read, tend to forward it and write letters about it. So I feel that I must update this warning again, as I did in 2004 and 2005
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 to prevent this from happening.

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.

Obviously some people wanted this hoax to continue circulating. Why, is anyone’s guess.

This past Easter, I was deluged by e-mails containing this hoax, many of them asking for signatures. One received will give you an idea of how many people are fooled or deceived by this hoax daily. There were over 800 names that had 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.

Oops, I just received one this Christmas season that beats the Easter one...2000 names! Readers, if you receive an e-mail petition, asking you to add your name, always delete it. Why? Anything being forwarded via e-mail can have the petition changed as it is forwarded. Let's say that you add your name to a petition to help children. You might be shocked to see later that the petition now had been changed to read something horrible and there is your name attached! All elected officials have instructed staff to always throw away or delete such petitions immediately. They are worthless and a waste of valuable time. E-mail that is forwarded can always be rewritten as it is sent along to others!

Also, 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, 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 true. 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