Cornett: Cowboy Conspiracy Theorists Get ‘Catfished’

It all started with this report on a popular online newsletter:

“WE WERE ABLE TO OBTAIN THIS PROSPECTIVE SECRET INSTRUCTION SHEET FROM UNNAMED SOURCES. THIS IMAGINED GUIDE PROVIDES THE COLOR FOR BEHIND THE SCENES COMMUNICATIONS AT THE BUY DESK TO THE FIELD BUYERS.*

              Wow. It was smoking gun stuff to eagerly suspicious ears. A step-by-step instruction sheet on how packing companies use their local buyers to manipulate the market. It was so explicit, so detailed, so starkly “just bygawd what I thought” that it seemed to me it smelled less like gunsmoke than stinky bait.

              Stinky bait. You know. Like when you’re catfishing. Wikipedia can explain what that means in the modern world. **

              So your trusty ex-reporter left the tractor idling and set about tracking down the source of the memo. It took a cupla emails is all it took. They (Yeah, I said “they.” Not because I’m woke, but because I chose not to divulge the gender of the unnamed source) said it was meant as satire. Not fish bait. They didn’t expect anybody to take it seriously. In fact, there were several glaring clues in the text.

But satire is a subtle art best left to the professionals, I suspect, and this one was a little too subtle apparently and stirred up a kerfuffle reminiscent of Orson Welles’ 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. ”We’re under attack. And they’re winning!”

              In this case, the parody was kind of meant to poke a bit of fun at what the unnamed source considers conspiracy theorists. It is, read as it was meant, quite clever. All that stuff we’ve suspected but never proved all in a neat package. Funny stuff.

But some folks didn’t “get it.”

Or they didn’t want to. Cattle people are about as divided on the packer situation as the rest of the country is on everything political. Some of us see the producer-packer relationship as a symbiotic competition. The old “packers. You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.” Another camp seems to regard the processors as more like parasites.

              I shall name no names here. (The unnamed sources said they sure didn’t want anybody else to know who they are because the phone calls already got scary.) But there are some beef industry bloggers and vloggers and social media commenters who may wish they had, as we professional reporters, trained by years of reading between the lines of PR flackery, say, double-checked their damned sources. They may not have egg on their faces, but I’d wager there’s a sore spot in their cheeks where the hook set.             

              Somewhere in here there should be a lesson about how social media work and how we are all so hungry for people to tell us what we already think. That’s why some of us watch Fox News and some of us watch CNN. Something that appears to back us up shows up online and we turn it viral. Left unchallenged, it sets up like concrete. If you’re convinced there is skullduggery afoot in packerland, you just clomp down. “Look at this, Ethyl. It’s just what I bygawd thought.”

              Good satire and stinky bait both require an element of truth—rotten sausage probably does taste good to a catfish, after all--and who am I to say there’s no skullduggery afoot? There’s nothing in the item that we haven’t all heard alleged.

              All that said, here’s the big lesson, and I’m pretty sure it’s not original with me: Don’t believe everything you read on the internet no matter how much you want it to be true. There is no blogger code of ethics. Many of them just blah-blah blog.

              More importantly, if you care to husband your credibility, check your damned sources before you regurgitate stink bait.

*If you didn’t catch it the first time, reread. Note the term “imagined.”

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catfishing