A newspaper’s trust with its readers

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Updated: February 28, 2012 8:19AM

If you are amazed about how Dante Autullo survived shooting himself in the skull with a nail gun last week, consider another fact about his accidental brush with fame that seems even more amazing.

Within 24 hours of the nail’s arrival in the Orland Park man’s cerebellum, news of the event had been repeated 22 million times by Internet “news providers.” Just search under “nail in the head” to see for yourself.

We don’t have to elaborate on how blazingly fast the World Wide Web connects every facet of our lives to everyone else in the world. We know all that.

But what you should most take from this event is how sure the world is that what happened to Autullo actually happened. We know it’s true because our reporters and photographers were there to cover the story — gathering the facts and talking to Autullo, his fiancee and his surgeon.

To whatever degree you trust trained, dedicated journalists, you can trust that Autullo did fire a nail into his brain accidentally and walked around for about 36 hours before realizing it.

But you also should be skeptical that several billion people on the planet are sure the story is true without an ounce of independent evidence that it is.

They are trusting that the Ghost in The Machine will not lie to us. We trust machines to work because we’re told they are trustworthy, as are the people behind them. In the case of the Internet, we tend to believe the theory that elaborate lies are harder to pull off than simple truths.

But the truth about the Internet is that almost no one knows exactly what they’re reading and viewing is the truth. Therein lies the conundrum of our brave new world — we know more facts than at any time in our history, but we have less evidence that any of them are true than ever before, too.

The lesson? If you’re tempted to dismiss your hometown newspaper as irrelevant to your life, think about Dante Autello’s quirky adventure.