by E.R. Shipp
Knight Ridder-Tribune
Just when black women - from rapper Mary J. Blige to tennis champ Serena Williams to some women twice their age - felt comfortable going blonde came word that blondness is facing extinction.
Naturally occurring blondness, that is.
Then came the strangest news of all: The reports were not just exaggerated, but completely fabricated. According to the report, natural blondes would become extinct within the next 200 years because their hair color derives from a recessive gene; the last blondes to survive, the "study" supposedly concluded, would be Finns.
Aha! We'd been had again, courtesy of the Internet and our increasing gullibility to cyberspace information.
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This time, the Geneva-based World Health Organization was forced to interrupt its globe-spanning fights against HIV/AIDS, suicide, meningitis and tuberculosis to state: "WHO wishes to clarify that it has never conducted research on this subject. . . . WHO has no knowledge of how these news reports originated but would like to stress that we have no opinion on the future existence of blondes."
The story that had spread across the networks and cable was easily debunked - and could have been nipped in the bud if reporters had done what we used to do automatically: check the facts.
Not just members of the press, mind you, find themselves stung by a rash reliance on Internet information. That, plus his own possible animus toward Israel, is what accounts for poet laureate Amiri Baraka's troubles in New Jersey.
He faces the loss of his position because of a poem he wrote based on information he said he got from the Internet after Sept. 11.
The real lesson here, though, is that when you're tempted to pass along something that's come your way from the Internet, do what I did when a friend of mine at the United Nations sent me the WHO statement on blondes.
I asked: "Is this for real?" - and then started doing some checking.
