Speech research in the new media era

Pundits often complain that the Internet tends to spread wild rumors, conspiracy theories, fake founding fathers quotations, and so forth. So it does. It also, however, makes fact-checking much easier. The Internet makes it easy to spread nonsense far and wide, but it also helps to catch crooks, liars, and scoundrels who peddle false information.

Speakers of all persuasions need to verify their facts carefully, for an audience equipped with smart phones can catch their errors in a moment. Spread a business myth--misquote a statistic about the divorce rate--get a historical fact wrong--and the audience will know during, or right after a speech, that the speaker made a mistake.

Suggestions for speakers:

1. Get information from more than one source.
2. Avoid sources that have an obvious agenda. Such sources tell you what the agenda is, but might not tell you what the truth is. 
3. Your public library offers free databases to patrons, and the librarian can guide you to the best ones for your topic. You can usually access them from your home computer. Once you get used to them, database searching is almost as fast as Googling, and the information is more likely to be accurate. 
4. Not everything that everyone believes is true. It's the speaker's responsibility to give accurate information.
5. As President Ronald Reagan said, quoting an old Russian proverb, "trust, but verify." Speakers need to check their facts.

Aristotle said that truth was more powerful than error (Rhetoric 1355a), a sentiment that Thomas Jefferson echoed many centuries later during his First Inaugural Address. In the long run, truth usually is more powerful than error. Whether a factual error is deliberate or accidental, a speaker who says wrong things will eventually lose credibility.