No, it wasn't true

and it wasn't fair either.
I had to keep an eye on the Twitter feed yesterday because I needed to know what was being reported about an incident elsewhere - and whether I would need to take action.
But there was something else that caught my eye too. It was the story of a man called "Paul Parker".  
Now Mr Parker is to be admired for volunteering as a fire fighter. It's a dirty, dangerous job and I would be among the first to support a fire fighter who was dismissed from the role simply because he had criticised the Prime Minister in some strong Anglo-Saxon language. I don't doubt that there were many other fire fighters who cursed the Prime Minister, every MP, the federal, state and local governments and a great many other things as well. That wasn't the problem.
The problem is that the story, which was repeated over and over again, simply wasn't true. The fire fighter in question had not been dismissed. He wasn't telling anyone that. People were buying him drinks at his local pub thinking he was some sort of hero for criticising the Prime Minister and being wrongfully dismissed for doing so.
He even raised the question, "How can a volunteer be dismissed?" (It is possible to dismiss a volunteer who brings discredit on an organisation - and so it should be.) 
Mr Parker however had not been dismissed. He was using the situation and so were a great many other people. Among them was a particularly high profile media commentator. Even after he must have known the story was not true he kept repeating it.
He kept repeating it until it was discovered that the fire fighter in question was not the far left wing Labor supporter or the Green that everyone had supposed him to be. He is apparently a supporter of the far right instead.  There has been silence from the high profile media commentator and silence from some of the usual suspects. 
It doesn't change what Mr Parker has said but apparently it changes their opinion of him. 
I am not really surprised by this. The high profile commentator (for my Downunder readers this was not Andrew Bolt for once) has not been silent for long. He is back this morning - this time criticising the Prime Minister for not continuing to subsidise the ailing Holden car industry.  What he is simply ignoring is that Holden has already had millions of dollars of taxpayer money and, despite that, people were not buying Holden cars. Why should the government give taxpayer money to a company which is making a product people no longer want to buy?
It is convenient of course for the commentator in question to simply forget this awkward fact. He's not in the business of facts. He is in the business of trying to bring down the government. The worrying thing is that he also teaches politics and journalism at one of Downunder's more reputable universities. It is worrying because, as an academic, he should be more aware of the dangers of what he is doing. 
But yesterday was a good reminder to me. "Don't believe what you read on the Twitter feed. check your facts." What I needed to know eventually came up - with a link to something I read quietly and carefully. Having done that I sent two emails. Something was done and a potentially serious situation was averted by someone who had taken the trouble to check with me and several other people. It felt good to have a small part in that process. I just wish everyone was as careful as the person who alerted me and the others involved that something needed to be done.