I watched a couple of episodes of a show called World's Greatest Hoaxes on Netflix last night. It's jam packed with great examples of various kinds of bias interfering with the truth. I want to watch it again and jot a few down, but a couple stuck out.
In the fake Hitler Diaries show, the person brokering the deal was obsessed with Hitler memorabilia to the point where he had to buy all of it- both real and fake. When the Hitler diaries surfaced, he happened to need money to buy Goering's yacht and restore it. He convinced himself they were real because he needed them to be real.
When suspicions arose that the diaries were fake, Rupert Murdoch had spent half a million dollars to get the publishing rights. His editors went to him to tell him their suspicions and through the whole meeting, Murdoch looked bored. He didn't care if they were fake or real. If they were fake, he'd just do a follow up story exposing the fake that would attract as many readers as the original story. Which is exactly what happened.
The man who faked the diaries and the guy who brokered them and convinced himself they were real both got the same sentence... 4 years. Millions of dollars were missing and probably stashed away in Swiss bank accounts, but they only got 4 years. This was because the judge considered that the publishers were complicit in not properly authenticating the diaries before they bought them. Essentially, it was the biggest fraud in modern history and everyone just walked away from it with no real punishment.
By keeping the diaries a secret, until they could publish them, they were preventing experts who could have tipped them off from warning them before they bought them. After the scandal, the only person who really took a career hit was the one historian who was on the newspaper's board of directors that they asked to look at the diaries to authenticate them. He didn't even really speak German and he did no scientific tests on the paper, binding or glue. If he had, he would have found out that all of it was from the 1970s.
On the cover of the diaries, there were gold embossed initials. The forger wasn't familiar with Germanic type faces, so he used an F for A. Everyone who looked at the diaries saw that the initials were FH, not AH but no one mentioned it because they couldn't even recognize contradictory evidence when it was right in front of their faces.
In the Loch Ness Monster show, one of the commenters says that no one comes to Loch Ness without expectations. Everyone who looks out on the lake is immediately imagining themselves seeing and photographing the monster. This prompts them to read a swell in the water or a floating log incorrectly.
Also in the Loch Ness show, they say that most Nessie sightings are near the castle on the edge of the lake... not because that is where the monster is, but because that is a major tourist attraction. Everyone visiting the lake stops there.
They pointed out that the loch itself was carved out by a glacier 6 million years ago, but plesiosaurs (the kind of dinosaur Nessie supposedly is) went extinct 66 million years ago. How did a dinosaur end up in a lake that was formed 60 million years after it went extinct? People are more than willing to ignore obvious scientific facts to believe the monster is real.
They estimated that the community of Loch Ness gets about 60 million pounds of revenue from tourists because of the myth of the monster. Because of this, they're in no hurry to prove it doesn't exist.
Lots of interesting things, and I can see how a lot of it applies to audiophoolery.