“He is dead!”
I looked at my friend askance.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I know because it is true. Have they said he is not?”
“Well, no… But how can you know he is dead?”
“I just know. He is dead.”
At about eleven o’clock Wednesday morning everyone went berserk. A member of staff butted in to the meeting room brandishing a mobile phone. Somehow, the friend on the end of the text knows a person who works in a foreign embassy, who told their mother, who mentioned it to her sister, who texted her daughter at work who texted my friend.
“It’s a very good source!” my friend exclaimed. He was already convinced.
At 12.50 a blogger in London, posted that he had it on “very good sources” that the man was dead.
One of the fountainheads of the rumour was Elendureports.com, who posted early on Wednesday that “multiple sources” had “confirmed” he was dead.
The flames of the rumour were probably fanned by the headline in the Lagos Sun which read “Deadly Ill” over a picture of the man. The message was just clear enough to be seen from a passing car, if the newspaper vendor had put the Sun on top of all the other titles he brandished. But even their own page six (six!) story didn’t bear out the confidence of the headline. It said he “may have gone abroad for treatment”. May have?
The phones went into meltdown. Everyone was spreading the rumour on, each one, no doubt was a “reliable source” for the next link in the chain.
I’ve never seen the feedback-loop of rumour work so frantically before. Each time someone heard it, it became stronger. It was like a brick dropped in a glass-still pool, the waves radiate out and then bounce back inward. When they collide, they double in size.
Years ago I read a story in the London Guardian that so affected me, I remember it to this day. In Guatemala, police were trying to find out why a Japanese tourist had been brutally murdered by villagers. The bus carrying the tourists was just about to leave a remote, rural, village when a gang of men descended on it, smashing windows and pelting the occupants with rocks. From the back of the bus they dragged a middle aged man. He was beaten and stabbed to death so savagely the coroner could not tell which blow killed him. Afterwards the villagers ran to the hills.
Over the next few weeks members of the lynch mob came back into town in drips and drabs, full of remorse and despair at what they had done. The police, flabbergasted, gradually pieced together what happened.
Someone (and no one could say exactly who) heard the tourists had been taking pictures of village children for a steal-to-order catalogue, where Japanese women could browse and choose the delightful bouncing Guatemalan baby to be kidnapped and brought up in Tokyo.
I was very glad the trainees at the paper asked me how a journalist can verify the truth. The truth is in the detail, I replied. So many questions arose from the news that Yar’Adua had been flown abroad –was he conscious when he went on the plane? Was it a scheduled airliner or an ambulance? Did he have an operation? Who made the decision to take him abroad? Any “source”, especially confidential ones, who cannot answer these details doesn’t know enough to verify the truth. A journalist who wants to be reliable should obsess about detail, and keep asking questions until they have the whole picture.
Beware the ripples -who heard it from whom? How you know something is as important as what you know. Someone who heard it from a friend can’t know for definite.
By 2pm the man had spoken to the BBC, and the lid started to slip back on the jar.
Elendureports.com, somewhat defiantly, put the headline “Yar’Adua not dead” above its earlier exclusive, “Yar’Adua dead”.
The latest post says: “We are still working on the story and will bring you details as we get them. We urge all our readers to be patient as we continue to investigate this intriguing story.” It remains to be seen if the publishers will turn on their sources and question their motives.