In This Age of Cynicism, Why Are We Still So Naive?

In journalism school, they had a saying -- "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

Considering we live in an age of cynicism, irony and sarcasm, you'd think it would be harder to pull a fast one on people -- particularly high-powered book editors and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.

And yet it keeps happening.

A con man named James Sabatino forges some documents, leading the L.A. Times to run a major article linking Sean "Diddy" Combs to a Tupac Shakur shooting. In hindsight, the docs look pretty shoddy and Sabatino's story pretty ridiculous. (Perhaps a Google search of Sabatino's name would have turned up past articles about his scams.)

A few years earlier, it was Dan Rather and his team, as well as the New York Times, snookered by a different set of documents.

Author Margaret Seltzer writes a wild book about growing up in gang culture, a white/Native American woman who's raised by an African-American woman who goes by the name "Big Mama." In hindsight, the story was pretty far-fetched. But a book publisher and plenty of reviewers fell for it.

A few years earlier, it was author James Frey, whose book "A Million Little Pieces" wound up being not so much memoir, but more so much fiction.

Fake intelligence convinced this nation to go to war in Iraq. The list goes on.

It's an interesting question -- what makes us so quick to suspend disbelief in some cases? Are we still hopeful enough to dismiss the notion that someone may be pulling the wool over our eyes? In these uncertain times, are we so looking to find success that we're blind to the red flags that this may not be it? Or, have people always been duped, but it took the Internet age to expose the world's frauds?