It has already been published in the paper edition of this newspaper a faith of errata, and in the digital version of my article a link to the Twitter thread that unraveled the skein I put together, but I wanted to leave here in writing that I ate a hoax and vomited it in your face. In last Sunday’s article I gave the astronomical number of donations that the big american companies they would have spilled over Black Lives Matter. This figure was false, as well as fanciful.
Although I have no excuse, I find it interesting to tell you how did it happen. He had taken it from an article published in ‘Newsweek’, And there it goes, by the way. The source was the controversial Claremont Institute, at the end most radical wing of trumpismo, but I gave him credibility. If one clicked on the “report & rdquor; I found lines and lines with the names of large companies, the figures donated by each one and a series of ‘links’ that supposedly referred to the tests. I didn’t bother to click on the links: everything gave a impression of seriousness and credibility, and after all I was reading it in a solvent medium. But the EFE journalist did. Luis Lidon, who, surprised by the exorbitant amount that he was offering and armed with a skepticism that I would have had to preserve, immediately discovered that the links did not show any proof of those donations. Everything was a huge hoax: an outrageous headline, an apparently informative text, and then, once you were going to the study at the Claremont Institute, not a single test a facade designed for a cousin like me to swallow, as it happened.
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The moment of discovering that you have screwed up is always unpleasant. But I think that swallowing a hoax always places you in a certain way before a mirror without beautifying filters: the skepticism with which I read certain things in the media disappears when I read certain other things, and this is because I, like everyone else, have my confirmation biases and my fucking common sense. Perhaps they are the most powerful enemies of those who want to see things as they are. It is a learning that I am grateful to the embarrassing moment.
Some people believe that the best thing in these cases is to pretend that nothing has happened or, in any case, apologize with a small mouth. I do not agree: making a mistake like this is a good opportunity to recognize it and remind the reader, to whom respect is due, that one is not infallible. I’m sorry!