On The Record : ‘We Want The Truth’ about ‘We Want Your Soul’
Posted on Wednesday, July 23, 2008
By now, most of Siloam Springs — and the rest of the country — has heard about the visit earlier this month to the city by two people offering to buy a woman’s soul.
An e-mail by Brenda Balk, public information officer for the Siloam Springs Police Department, was sent out saying a call had been made to the office by a third party saying that a woman was approached by two men asking her odd questions and eventually offering to buy her soul. Both men allegedly had tattoos on their hand similar to one we discovered on a Web site called www. wewantyoursoul. com.
Why didn’t you read about this in the Herald-Leader as a news story on the front page ? How come a local television station reported it but not us ?
Well, the simple answer is because the group supposedly behind the soul purchase is a hoax.
The “ group’s” Webs site first appeared in January 2003 and is owned by Hope Music — an independent record label currently located in Britain.
A little bit of research shows that the Web site is a front to publicize a band that nobody across this side of the Atlantic Ocean has ever heard of. The group is called Freeland, and the first track on their 2003 album Now and Then just happens to be called “ We Want Your Soul. ”
Further research into the third-party phone call from northeast Oklahoma shows there are several inconsistencies with the story.
Also, research shows that when the site actually worked as advertised, the quoted price given for your soul was always in British pounds — which aren’t accepted at the local Wal-Mart for payment as far as I know.
Let’s suppose for a minute that a group was actually in town offering to purchase souls. I received at least a few e-mails from concerned parents worried if their children were safe on the streets of Siloam Springs with “ soul pandering” going on in their midst and questioning why the police weren’t putting a stop to it.
There is no law against offering money for someone’s soul — and still no laws would be broken if you accepted payment for your soul. It seems the soul — unlike your heart, lungs and kidneys — is not a physical organ that laws in several countries forbid the sale of.
Yes, you can legally sell your soul, but not your liver — except on eBay. It seems they have outlawed the selling of your own soul, or that of someone else, after several auctions were made public in the last few years. Instead of taking this e-mail — from a legitimate source — and running a breaking news story about it, we wisely chose to wait and investigate on our own first. While the first job of a newspaper is to inform the community it serves, we also strive to dispel rumors that get blown out of proportion. When the Internet first became popular, I was working in a newsroom as a cub reporter alongside an editor who was not quite as savvy about online hoaxes. I was assigned one week to ask a police lieutenant about rumors of local gangs riding around the area in cars waiting for someone to flash their lights at them, and kill the driver. We all know now that those tales are just urban myths, but I had to explain that to my editor who really wanted a story on it. Sometimes, the bigger story isn’t what you read in the paper, but why some things were left out.
— Gary Burton is managing editor for the Herald-Leader. You can send emails to garyb @ nwanews. com or call 541-5144.
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