I adore it when a publication commits a heinous irony while attempting to condescend to its ideological opposition in a long and tortuously drawn out essay. Behold, The Atlantic presents you with this comedic headline, comedic, considering the subhead that follows: How can Americans talk to one another–let alone engage in political debate–when the Web allows every side to invent its own facts?
THIS PAST AUGUST, the left-leaning San Francisco-based Web site AlterNet posted a remarkable scoop: members of a group calling itself the Digg Patriots were banding together to promote conservative-leaning online stories and to drive down the rankings of stories that the group felt showed a liberal bias.
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Further, the AlterNet story alleged, Digg Patriots were creating ghost accounts whereby they could muster “bury brigades” with far more influence than their actual numbers permitted. “One bury brigade in particular,” the article said, became “so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours.” The effect of this burying was to prevent other Digg users from finding those articles and rendering their own opinions on them, effectively coming as close to censorship as is possible in the social-media sphere. After the AlterNet article was posted, the Digg Patriots user group was taken down, and Digg eliminated the “bury” option on its site; Digg also began an internal investigation into AlterNet’s claims.
And? The Atlantic bases their shock on the presupposition that the left would never do anything of the sort.
Take an early example of this truth warfare: in September 2009, an estimated 60,000 to 75,000 people showed up on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to protest President Obama’s “socialist” agenda. Unhappy with that reported turnout figure, conservative blogs disseminated a photo showing that there had been, in fact, 2 million attendees.
Right. This isn’t 75,000 people. Even park rangers were spouting off quotes to Twitter journalists using phrases like “over a million.” Time lapsed video for the 9/12/09 crowd:
Ignoring all the other media counts, The Atlantic went with the lowest figure. Funny, that’s almost the exact same number ABC asserted was at 8/28/10. I guess it’s a favorite number. I spoke offhandedly with a park employee who declined to go on camera during the 8/28 event; they told me that the green areas on either side of the reflecting pool hold 250k people. The middle of the mall, on either side of the reflecting pool, can hold roughly around 200k. Neither of these figures include a crowd count for the WWII memorial or the grassy area leading up to the Washington Monument.
This makes me chuckle:
Many, but not all, of these incidents involve movement conservatives, who continue to prove savvier than their liberal counterparts about deploying new media (see Matt Drudge, aggregation; Rush Limbaugh, talk radio; Sarah Palin, Twitter)
Conservatives are either stupid or brilliant. Pick a narrative, leftist MSM. You can’t have it both ways.
More neophytic editorializing:
Last spring, the community-organizing group ACORN disbanded, having been subjected to withering and quasi-racist attacks by Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart since 2008. It did this even though numerous investigations had determined that the main piece of evidence conservatives had used against it–notorious “sting footage” purportedly showing ACORN representatives advising a “pimp” and a “prostitute” (both in fact conservative activists) how to defraud the government–had been heavily doctored.
In the author’s pitiful attempt to give everyone a lesson on bias, said author commits one of a string of them by casually omitting how the ACORN mess was brought on by whistle-blower and activist Anita MonCrief, a woman who so terrifies MSM that they pull every Bull Connor trick in the book to extricate her from ACORN’s history. This author omits how such a story was brought on, in part, by the eight ACORN employees who plead guilty to voter fraud, who used the good name of community service to funnel votes to the DNC.
The Atlantic also fails to mention that the very same SOS on whose watch the ACORN fraud befell is the exact same senatorial candidate running against Roy Blunt this midterm. More on this story in the coming week.
Michael Hirschorn continues after flogging the dead and long-disproved narrative of the ghostly edited tapes:
In July, the conservative Web activist [Breitbart] helped cost African American USDA official Shirley Sherrod her job–and, in the process, contributed to humiliating the NAACP and President Obama–when he posted a two-and-a-half-minute portion of a speech she had given in March about the importance of racial understanding, edited to imply that she was a racist. When later asked about the doctoring of the tape, Breitbart refused to back down or apologize: “I think the video speaks for itself,” he said.
Hirschorn didn’t bother researching anything for his article that went beyond the scope of Kos-Aid. I invite Hirschorn to learn the definition of the term “exculpatory” and then watch the full tape, as I and many others have done. An excerpt is not the same thing as edited. If you’re going to attempt media criticism, please learn this difference or do us all a favor and and don’t clog the Internet with yet another post filled with the same tripe reprinted by half-a-dozen prog-bloggers. Shirley Sherrod owes Andrew Breitbart a “thank you” for not including the end of her speech in his original post. The White House showed its hand too soon by firing her to add distance between themselves and Pigford; it was an unintentional catch they orchestrated themselves simply because Breitbart was trying to show a racist NAACP audience.
Watch me do your job for you.
Full video:
– The original post and video was to highlight the applause of discrimination towards a white farmer. It was given in context.
– The original video was not “doctored” nor “out of context,” and the irony is that those making such statements are actually taking the context away from its original presentation. Sherrod was building to a lesson in her speech – but went on later in her speech to talk about how people who support HCR are racist, essentially. It’s at 23:53 in.
Transcript:
“I Haven’t seen such mean-spirited people as I’ve seen lately over this issue of health care. Some of this racism we thought was buried didn’t it surface?” Now we endured eight years of the Bushes and we didn’t do the stuff that these Republicans are doing because you have a black president.”
Right, so people who wanted to make their own medical decisions over their own bodies were doing it because they were racist. Gotcha.
While I’m continuing to do Hirschorn’s homework, check this at 25:00 in:
I couldn’t say 45-years ago, I couldn’t stand here and say what I will say to you tonight… God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people.
Why can’t it just be about PEOPLE? PEOPLE, PERIOD?
Sherrod is using race to stoke class warfare and promote Marxist principles.
Breitbart posted an excerpt of the best and kindest portion of Sherrod’s speech to highlight the reaction of the audience who applauded when they thought the white man was getting his.
Also, if Hirschorn wants to tackle a real story, he should check out the Pigford settlement and ask why a then-Senator Obama worked so hard to get billions for people who didn’t have to at all show proof of USDA discrimination, and why the number of claimants exceed the actual number of farmers? Is the reason that most of the MSM hasn’t tackled this story because it would require them to exercise the part of the their brain not in use for turning DNC press releases into regurgitated content?
The conventional wisdom of the early social-media era held that the end of mainstream-media dominance would create a democratization of truth: Arthur Sulzberger and Rupert Murdoch, with their inbred biases and buried agendas, would no longer own a monopoly on the facts.
The problem with this is that as social media grew, so did the awareness of the electorate and we all know that the biggest threat to tyranny is an informed electorate. Socio-prog journalists, knowing that they can’t outright lie (as much) to the public anymore, are now seeking to plant the idea of doubt into the minds of us helpless proletariat. Make them question their reality and you can have their minds again – except that the media blows at this, thanks in part to new media.
That the author attempts to defend the foreigner who decided it randy to make himself famous by putting targets on the backs of the men and women in uniform who serve this country – while vilifying an individual who seeks to expose government corruption – showed us the rest of his hand with his article and thus, the piece ceased to serve a purpose other than occupy space as some angry ranting about how awful conservatives are ruining the world.
While Breitbart unapologetically conducts his information warfare à la Sartre via Malcolm X–by any means necessary, including blatant falsehoods–Assange uses “truth” as a weapon while assuming that context will be provided by the commons …
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Assange was on surer ground last spring with his blockbuster leak of video footage that showed an American helicopter strike killing civilians in Iraq.
I can tell that Hirschorn has never had to kill an animal in order to eat, or that he has any experience with firearms or weaponry of any sort as it’s common knowledge and clearly visible that the “civilians” were insurgents carrying RPGs with one of them hiding behind a building preparing to position the weapon towards the helicopter.
I’m sure that guy just had a really large arm and was simply waving. Forget that there had been reports of a fire fight prior to the military’s arrival, forget that they were in active armed conflict and that the area was a known hotbed of insurgency, BAD AMERICA.
I’ll let Hirschorn’s own graph finish this highlight of absurdity:
The urge to shape the data to suit the message, to outfit one’s argument with a set of misappropriated, cynically edited, or simply fabricated facts that can be fed into a self-sustaining partisan feedback loop, will no doubt prove irresistible to many.
Indeed. Thanks for the example.